56 Clavarias of the United States and Canada 



Our early hopes that we had found distinctive characters were 

 soon broken down by entire lack of any correlation of characters. 

 In No. 5790 the taste was not bitter, the spores were creamy yel- 

 low, and the clubs were hollow: in No. 5507 the spores were pure 

 white in a good print, the taste was not bitter and the clubs were 

 hollow; in No. 5586 the taste was rankly bitter, the spores were 

 pure white, and some plants (not flattened) were hollow; in No. 

 5679 the taste was mild, the spores were white, and the clubs were 

 hollow. In two collections from the identical spot and evidently 

 from the same mycelium taken at Hartsville, S. C, one in 1916, 

 the other in 1917, the first (No. 12) was quite bitter, the second 

 (No. 26) was scarcely bitter but distinctly farinaceous. The 

 spores in both were yellowish. It then appears that if there are 

 two species they can at present be separated only by the color of 

 the fresh spores in good prints, and as the European form of C. 

 fusiformis is said to have the spores yellow when fresh (Cotton 

 and Wakefield, p. 184) it may still be that C. platyclada is a slightly 

 different plant (form or variety) distinguished by its white spores 

 and perhaps by other slight differences that have so far escaped 

 us. Clavaria compressa Schw. is almost certainly this. A col- 

 lection under that name in the Schweinitz Herbarium has spores 

 subspherical, smooth, 4.8-6 x 6-7(1.. In the Curtis Herbarium is 

 also a fragment from the Schweinitz Herbarium, so named, which 

 is about 2.5-3 mm. broad, flat and channelled, with spores 5.5 x 

 6.7f/.; the basidia 2-4 spored. Persoon (Myc. Europ., p. 178) re- 

 ferred to C. fusiformis the plant which he first described (Comm., 

 p. 73) as C. fasciculata, but later gave the latter as a synonym of 

 C. inaequalis. However, his interpretation of C. inaequalis could 

 hardly have been the one now accepted. The description of C. 

 fasciculata Villars while short is good and leaves little doubt that 

 it is the same as the present species. The only plant of that name 

 in Persoon's herbarium is labelled C. fasciculata DC.,* sent by 

 Mangeat. It looks just like C. fusiformis and has the same spores, 

 which are subspherical with a sharp mucro, 5-6 x 6-7. 5 [k (counting 

 mucro). 



*DeCandolle described C. fasciculata in Syn. Plant. Flora Gall., p. 19, 1806. without 

 giving any authority, and this may have given rise to a misunderstanding in regard 

 to the author of the species. 



