RARE FUNGUS. 221 



good a substitute as one could expect to have in point of flavour and 

 pungency. The flavour and pungency are due to an essential oil 

 which is abundant in the loose parenchyma of the bark of the Moringa. 

 The soft and porous woody tissue also contains this essential oil. 

 JNo wonder then that any parasite throwing its mycelium on its most 

 vitaHy active cells should imbibe the esseutial oil and retain it in its 

 «wn tissue. 



The odour of this fungus seems attractive to a certain kind of insect. 

 It is a small weevil of the size of a pea. I hope to investigate this on 

 a future occasion, as I find that it commonly infests the Moringa 

 aod burrows into its bark, cambium layer and even wood. This weevil 

 attacked the whole specimen I am describing within two days after 

 I had collected it, chiefly destroying the inner spongy tissue and leav- 

 ing the bare " epidermis " of the pileus if I may so term it. The 

 major portion of my fungus was thus destroyed. The chief point 

 for congratulation is that following the principle of " striking while 

 the 'iron is hot," a principle always well worth following in the 

 study and sketching of fungi, I had Mr. Isaac Benjamin — my gifted 

 artistic friend who has always been an invaluable prime aid to me in 

 all my botanical sketches — to draw the fungus on stone on the spot, 

 the very day I observed it. 



The question strikes one as to whether this peculiar horse-raddish 

 odour has an attraction for the weevil that destroyed my fungus, 

 for we find that it certainly, I ought to say presumably on account 

 of that odour, attacks the host, even in the living state of the latter. 

 Everybody who knows the habit of the Moringa pterygosperma 

 can call back to memory the gum- studded stem of this tree marked 

 with.burrows and furrows clogged with the millet-seed sized globules 

 of the weevils' excreta bound up in innumerable chains with flocculent 

 fibres not unlike a cobweb. Does this weevil find any special 

 charm in the odour which the fungus inherited from the Moringa ? 



Mr. M. C. Cooke— that indefatigable veteran mycologist of 

 England who has kept British mycology abreast of the most advanced 

 mycology of Europe, in writing in a recent number of his Gre- 

 villea (December, 1890), on the attractive odours in fungi — mentions 

 that the well-known fungus called Russella fotans seems to be attrac- 

 tive to slugs, since it is usually found more or less eaten bv them. 



