Order Hymenomycetes. Tribe PUeati. 



Plate LVII. 



BOLETUS SCABER, Bumard. 



Bough-stemmed Boletus. 



Gen. Char. Hyinenium distinct from the substance of the pileus, consisting of eyliudric separable tubes 

 Name from ^oXXos, a hall, fr-om the rounded form of many of them. 



Spec. Char. Boletus scaber. Pileus fi-om three to seven inches or more across, pulvinate, \ascid when 

 moist ; very variable in colour, whitish, cinereous, brown, olive, buff, bay, deep orange or vermilion ; smooth or 

 minutely downy, the down sometimes collected into minute fasciculate scales; flesh very thick, soft, white not 

 changeable in young specimens, in older ones turning vinous gi-ey when cut or bruised. The porous mass is 

 pulvinate, extremely convex in age ; tubes dirty white at fii'st, then further discoloured and yellow-brown from the 

 spores; minute, their orifices round. Spores dusky ferruginous. Stem at fii-st ovate, and the pileus very narrow, 

 with traces of the floccose veil ; in maturity the stem is six inches or more high, attenuated upwards, squarrose 

 with black or orange scales, or marked with fibrUlose raised lines, sometimes perfectly white, but generally the 

 fibrillse are brown or black. Spores dusky ferruginous. 

 Boletus scaber, Bulliard, Fries, Berkeley, Soicerby, Persoon, Gremlle. 

 Am-antiacus, Bulliard, Sowerby, Witlierincj. 



Hah. In woods and woodland districts. Summer and autumn ; extremely common. 



In a fungus-hunting expedition recently, the two extremes of Boletus scaber presented themselves, and 

 certainly it was difficult to persuade our basket-bearing tyro that the elegant, tall gentleman with enough 

 black fibrillae to set off the wliite of his stem, and the vermilion of his rich soft kid-leather cap, could be 

 " own brother " to the swarthy, shiny, scabrous, very vulgar individual, we encountered afterwards. It 

 was the difference, which has so often given subjects to the caricaturist, that between the dirty ruffian and 

 the trim grenadier, and only on consideration how much under differing conditions the sons of Adam differ 

 could the possibility of such fungus differences be conceded by the uninitiated. 



Whatever his garb may be, it must be remembered no tinge of yellow, green, or blue, is under any 

 circumstances present in this Boletus, the various tints of oclirey-red, buff, or brown pervade it ; for even 

 under its gayest colours, the name Auivintiacus is not apt — it is of a mineral red — a didl vermihon, not a 

 dark orange tincture, like the mixture of yellow with lake. The common hue varies from dull buff to 

 bay-brown ; only the red variety has the smallest pretension to beauty, wliile the pores are yet unstained by 

 the ripening spores, that is handsome, the size and colouiing, and general effect are imposing. Another 

 variety with a clean buff cap and snow-wliite stem on which the downy raised lines are quite destitute of 

 dark scales or fibrils has several times been collected, and is, although not so specious as the Aurantiacus, a 

 very good looking quaker of a toadstool. Both these are esculent when young, and not water-soaked by 



