378 WILD FLOWEES OF 



narrow bridge arching the gulf, where the raving 

 waters, red with the slaughtered soil, roar, splash, and 

 struggle, while on the masses of stones that lie around 

 in confused disorder, vast whirl-holes are engraved as 

 vestiges of former watery warfare. The irrecoverable 

 plunge hurries the stream into profound darkness, 

 beyond the reach of vision, and its further course, 

 like the unknown future, is shrouded in the solemn 

 gloom of blasted yews, and old battered beeches, 

 whose fantastic boles rooted into the rifted rock, swell 

 out into the strangest and most grotesque forms. 



In such hidden recesses, among the dead fungoid 

 masses of beech-leaves that thickly strew the ground, 

 the scrutinizing eye may sometimes detect the curious 

 close-lurking Monotropa Hypopitys, whose brown with- 

 ered aspect, and brown flowers, renders it almost 

 inconspicuous in the twilight groves. The economy 

 of this plant is very remarkable. We find it seated 

 among beech roots in a hard intangled mass without 

 any certain apparent parasitical attachment, though 

 the beech roots appear many of them in a dead and 

 exhausted state. The roots of the Monotropa itself 

 are fleshy and branched, much like those of the Lis- 

 ter a nidus-avis, but more widely extended, and covered 

 with a white cobwebby mycelious production, perfectly 

 transparent when seen through the microscope, and 

 seeming to be a fungus in an abortive state, its ulti- 

 mate filaments much resembling the anomalous Ozo- 

 nia auricomum.* Whether this is parasitical upon 



* Mr. T. G. Rv LANDS has, iu a paper in the Phytologjst, characterized 

 this, under the name of Epfphagos Luxfordii, as an actual plant, " pro- 

 bably a hyssoid Alga," but as no fructification could be found this appears 

 very doubtiul ; and after much microscopical observation of these very 

 curious filaments, I can only come to the conclusion, unsatisfactory as it 

 is, that they are a metamorphosis of the decayed beech rootlets, which are 



