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RESEARCHES ON FUNGI 



The cow-dung plats in which Sphaerobolus was found were not 

 fresh and green but old and, to a very large extent, rotted and 

 exhausted. They no longer bore fruit-bodies of Piloboli, Ascoboli, 

 or Coprini and, when broken across, were found to be traversed by 

 open channels, doubtless borings which had been made by the 



Fig. 169. — A layer of an old cow-dung plat, obtained in a meadow 

 at the Manitoba Agricultural College, Winnipeg, November 14, 

 1923, showing an interior surface. Throughout the dung is 

 the characteristic mycelium of Sphaerobolus stellatus which, 

 along the edge at s, s, s has produced a line of young fruit- 

 bodies. In the laboratory these fruit-bodies completed 

 their development and discharged their projectiles. Natural 



size. 



larvae of a large dung beetle that had disappeared. 1 The plats 

 containing the fungus could be identified by the characteristic 

 white mycelial strands which were particularly numerous between the 

 successive droppings (Figs. 168 and 169) and which in fourteen plats 

 had grown toward the periphery of the dung and had there formed 

 fruit -bodies. As could be seen by breaking plats in the middle into 



1 One of the cow-dung plats which did not bear Sphaerobolus contained at its 

 base, just above the grass, a number of large, somewhat irregularly shaped sclerotia 

 of Coprinus Rostrupianus. This was my first finding of this species. I have often 

 found it since in a similar situation. 



