COPRINUS PICACEUS 



297 



Mr. J. Ramsbottom has informed me that, during the Great War, he 

 observed large numbers of the fruit-bodies coming up in a sandy 



Fig. 129. — Coprinus picaceits, a member of the Atramentarius Sub-type, 

 known by its dark ovate-campanulate pileus being variegated with 

 broad white superficial scales. A, a fruit-body growing in tlie 

 open. Its gills are about to liberate spores and undergo auto- 

 digestion from below upwards. B, the same fruit-body in vertical 

 section. Here, as in C. atramentarius, the gills are held tiglitly 

 together by cystidia crossing the interlamellar spaces. Hence the 

 gills in the plane of section have split down their median planes, 

 thus exposing their tramae. The hymenial surfaces of the broken 

 gills are to be seen as black longitudinal lines and the tramal sur- 

 faces as broad grey areas. Photographed at Keswick, England, in 

 September, 1922, l)y Somerville Hastings and the autlior. Natural size. 



place near Salonika. The species, while widely dispersed in Europe, 

 appears to be absent from North America.^ 



^ C. G. Lloyd {Mycological Writings, vol. v, Letter no. 68, p. 10) states that the 

 North American Coprinus named by Peck a variety of C. picaceus does not resemble 

 the C. picaceus of Europe. One of the late E. T. Harper's photographs of the 

 Coprini, which have been deposited in the Field Museum at Chicago, is labelled 

 C. picaceus, but 1 am sure this identification is erroneous : the fungus shown is not 

 C. picaceus, but may be a scaly form of C. atramentarius. 



