BO T AN Y 



ON THE GROWTH AND HABITS OF THE FUNGI. 



A VALUABLE contribution to botanical science, published in London 

 during the past year, entitled "Outlines of British Fungolog} T ; containing 

 Characters of above a Thousand Species of Fungi, and a Complete List of 

 all that have been described as Natives of the British Isles," by the Rev. 

 M. J. Berkeley, is made by the London Athenaeum the basis for the following 

 popular and instructive article. 



The fungus is a kindly friend, a fearful foe. We like him as a mushroom. 

 We dread him as the dry-rot. He may be preying on your roses or eating 

 through the corks of your claret. He may get into your corn-field. A fun- 

 gus has eaten up the vine in Madeira, the potato in Ireland. A fungus may 

 creep through your castle, and leave it dust. A fungus ma} 7 banquet on your 

 fleets, and bury the payment of its feast in lime. Fungi are most at home 

 upon boles of old trees, logs of wood, naked walls, pestilential wastes, old 

 damp carpets, and other such things as men cast out from their own homes. 

 They dwell also in damp wine-cellars, much to the satisfaction of the wine- 

 merchant when they hang about the walls in black powdery tufts, and much 

 to his dissatisfaction when a particular species, whose exact character is 

 unknown, first attacks the corks of his wine-bottles, destroying their texture, 

 and at length impregnates the wine with such an unpleasant taste and odor 

 as to render it unsalable; more still to his dissatisfaction when another 

 equally obscure species, after preying upon the corks, sends down branched 

 threads into the precious liquid, and at length reduces it to a mere caput 

 mortyum. 



In addition to such congenial places as these, we find fungi where no 

 one would have expected them ; as on our window panes and the lenses of 

 microscopes, and even on smooth metallic surfaces. Not many years ago 

 it was a decided saying, even amongst men of some pretensions, that fungi 

 could not grow upon healthy substances ; it is, however, now sufficiently 

 established that the most healthy tissues may be affected by them so as 

 rapidly, under their influence, to become diseased. They are not uncom- 

 mon on the dressings of amputated limbs, and have led to ill-grounded 

 charges of chirurgical negligence; and it is singular that they are capable 

 of growth in substances which are, in general, destructive of vegetables, 

 such as tannin, and many species prefer spent tan to almost any other sub- 

 stance. More than one species of fungus is developed on extracted opium, 



