THE PERENNIAL PSEUDORHIZA 383 



were situated about forty young fruit-bodies, the largest of which 

 had a stipe that as yet was only 1 • 5 inches long and a pileus as yet 

 only 0-7 inch wide. Doubtless, if the cluster had been left un- 

 disturbed, only a few of the forty fruit-bodies would have completed 

 their development and have shed spores, for I have observed that 

 in all large mature Collybia fusipes clusters there are a few fully 



Fig. 191. — Collybia fusipes. A large fruit-body with a thin 

 pseudorhiza of its own attached to an irregularly cylindrical 

 persistent pseudorliiza which resembled a piece of rotten 

 wood. Obtained above a Beecli root in Queen's Cottage 

 Grounds, Kew. Natural size. 



expanded fiuit-bodies and a considerable number of much smaller, 

 imperfectly developed, fruit-body rudiments. It is the rule, here 

 as elsewhere in the Agaricaceae, that the fruit-body rudiments 

 largely outnumber the fruit-bodies which are destined eventually 

 to produce spores. In some clusters the bases of those fruit-body 

 rudiments which are inhibited in their development appear to persist 

 through the winter and, by undergoing a certain amount of renewed 

 thickening, to add to the mass of the persistent pseudorhizal strand 

 from which in the next summer the new fruit-bodies arise. 



