210 ii.Tcil : THE ii mm 



many as fifty have been counted on one oomb. But 

 does more than one Plvteua develop from a comb. 

 The remainder are arrested at this stage and will not grow 

 further. The exterior of these aborted agarics becomes 

 feebly cartilaginous and the interior hyphse form thick-walled 

 cells. In old specimens the walls of the original cells are 

 thickened until the cavity is almost obliterated, and a section 

 from such a specimen separates readily into its component 

 cells. These are 40-100 n long and very irregular in shape: 

 H connections and branched cells are common (fig. 16) and 

 many of the narrower cells are U-shaped. The cell wall is 

 faintly laminated and in many cases the thickening takes an 

 annular form (fig. 17) : indeed, a tendency to the production 

 of this annular thickening may be traced in nearly all the larger 

 cells, but even in the best examples the rings are not sharply 

 defined like those figured for Baltarrea, but are rounded off on 

 either side. These sclerenchymatous cells do not stain with 

 phloroglucin. 



Several experiments have been tried with these aborted 

 agarics to see whether under any conditions they would re -com- 

 mence growth or produce other structures, but in all cases 

 they merely decayed. No growth resulted from the separate 

 cells when these were suspended in hanging drops of water or 

 comb extract. 



These aborted agarics constitute Thwaites' specimen No. 

 176, bul they do not. as stated by Berkeley, develop on combs 

 i (posed to the light. There is no apparent reason why they 

 should not develop further in the nest: as a rule, they do not 

 h the wall of the chamber, and the majority are larger than 

 the one from which the agaric has developed. There is no 

 e of a pileus in these aborted agarics, but that they are 



really such is shown by the similar structure at the base of the 

 PhUetU stalk, in which the thick-walled cells are oven better 



, ■ il. It seems probable that these in their earlier stage 

 were the collections of concurrent hyphffi noted by Holtermann 



and that the sclerenchymatoufl cells of the agaric led him to 



