NYCTALIS ASTEROPHORA 451 



down with difficulty ; their substance remained firm, and they 

 conducted all their juices to the parasite, the neighbourhood of which 

 was continually moist. From the tenth to the fourteenth day the 

 fungi {Asterophora hjcoperdoides) grew quickly and at the end they 

 were already four lines high. The caps were smooth and the stalks 

 floccose, but all as yet colourless. 



" On the fifteenth day one or two fungi of a group took the lead 

 and grew apparently at the cost of the others. 



" On the twentieth day the fibrillae had already disappeared 

 from the stalk which had become smooth and had attained a height 

 of \-\\ inches. 



" However, the cap became floccose, and its margin separated 

 itself from the surface of the stalk and became floccose ; but the 

 individual lamellae were not yet visible. At this stage the growth 

 of the stalk or stipe appeared to have come to an end and the 

 development of the cap began to go forward so much the faster. 



" The cap, which earlier had been rounded, elongated, or spherical, 

 now became hemispherical, which form, however, with the appear- 

 ance of the lamellae, changed to that of a cushion. This was 

 accompanied by the straight stalk becoming shiny and smooth 

 and the cap breaking up in a floccose manner. Through the breaking 

 up of the cap into flocculi there became visible the included spores 

 (chlamydospores) which bulged out as a mass of powder. 



" The youngest scarcely established fungus-balls three or four 

 days old, as also the pellicles of the caps of the somewhat older fungi, 

 enclosed from the twelfth to the fourteenth day a fleshy, textureless, 

 more or less firm mass of tissue. On the seventeenth or eighteenth 

 day this substance received much sap and, on the eighteenth day, 

 became watery. On the very same day it became firmer again, on 

 the nineteenth day lost almost all its fluidity and, on the twentieth 

 to the twenty-first day, was again dry and powdery. While solidi- 

 fication was in progress, it was already possible to find a few star-like 

 seeds (chlamydospores) intermixed with hyphae and dried, but from 

 the twenty-first to the twenty-third day all the spores were regularly 

 star-shaped. 



" These fungi produced by sowing spores were very different in 

 appearance from the mother-plant. 



