330 THAXTER. 



ters to the preceding species. It is said to form a superficial, golden 

 yellow, more or less reddish "stroma," forming a crust or cushion, and 

 covered with yellow giant cells 260-400 X 50-100 ^i. The individual 

 stromata are rounded or ovoid, solitary and scattered, or contiguous 

 and confluent; each containing a "perithecium" (sporocarp), or two 

 to three superposed, about one third of a millimeter in diameter, com- 

 pletely surrounded (entoures) by the stroma. The spores, (theques) 

 are rounded ovoid, brownish yellow, 70-130 X 35-lOO^iu, the walls 

 thick; the sporogenous filaments 12-16 /x in diameter: they form a 

 single radial zone lying side by side in a single layer with the long axis 

 radially directed. The sporocarps ("perithecia") are hard and 

 sclerotium-like, whitish, formed from interwoven hyphae which are 

 thick-walled, colorless and 4-5 ix in diameter, surrounding the sporo- 

 genous layer, those on the surface terminating in characteristically 

 modified broadly fusiform swollen extremities, or by a series of two or 

 three such enlargements. 



M. Patouillard has been so obliging as to send me two fragments of 

 the type, one of which is comparatively young. From an examination 

 of these specimens it would appear that the fungus arises in yellowish 

 patches which may become variously confluent. This mycelial layer, 

 crust or stroma, is made up of two distinct elements: relatively slender 

 and thick-walled, branching, interlaced, aseptate hyphae extending 

 radially and giving rise to the sporocarps: and large septate hyphae, 

 the swollen segments of which are thin-walled and usually closely 

 coherent, forming the covering of giant cells mentioned by Patouillard, 

 as well as a rather scantily developed lysigenous matrix about the 

 sporocarps, which appear to become completely free through its 

 ultimate disappearance. On the surface of the crust or stroma, these 

 cells, which appear very irregular in outline, though radially elongate, 

 form a yellow pseudotissue. Figures 83-84; the whole at first con- 

 tinuous, but later, and on drying, becoming cracked and broken into 

 irregular areas, with uneven elevations of the surface which corre- 

 spond in a general way to the sporocarps lying immediately below 

 them. Beneath this crust, the sporocarps are crowded, at maturity, 

 in a loose dry mass, and may be supposed to be scattered separately 

 when freed by its disintegration. 



The younger specimen examined shows the sporocarp-origins still in 

 process of formation immediately beneath the surface of the crust, as 

 well as the more or less clearly defined relation of superposition which 

 the older sporocarps continue for a time to bear to one another. Their 

 temporary coherence is due to connecting wefts of smaller, relatively 



