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feet blossoms, never exposing the interior organs. All our Gentians 

 are blue, but in other lands there ai;e red species, and a splendid yel- 

 low one ((?. lutea) in Central Europe, whose root is an important 

 medicine, intensely bitter in taste. 



Perhaps the most remarkable thing brought forward in this line to- 

 day, was a huge cluster of orange-colored fungi, detached in one mass 

 from the decayed wood, where thej- grew, and served up in a dish like 

 a pile of tempting cream cakes. The speaker disclaimed the critical 

 knowledge of those that would enable him to give the exact name ; 

 but as to their general character there could be no question. These 

 are plants of exceeding simplicity of structure, whose proper frame- 

 work and growth consist of mere tubular, branching cells, running 

 every way through the decaying substances where they seat them- 

 selves, and interlacing to a plexus little inferior to the felt of a Me- 

 thuen hat. From this living felt, or mycelium, rises, here and there, a 

 bud-cell, growing often to a great size, and developing, for floral and 

 reproductive purposes, to such strange and curious forms as we see 

 in the mushrooms of the table, and in these fungi of to-day, and ten 

 thousand others beside. We generally suppose the toadstools we see 

 are the whole plants ; but really they are only the flowers or what 

 answers therefor. Thus will be seen the real explanation of another 

 botanical puzzle. Fungi having been found to evolve carbonic acid, 

 while plants in general give off oxygen, it was infei'red that their 

 economy was of the reverse order, and that they were peculiarly 

 deadly in their character, and nourished by decay and corruption. 

 But when we look at them as ouly the flowers of a concealed vegeta- 

 tion, we remember that all expanded flowers thus yield carbonic acid, 

 while the oxygen is oulj^ thrown ofl' by tlie green leaves, and only very 

 slightly where there are none of these, as in broomrapes and parasitic- 

 dodders. So the anomaly vanishes and the constitution of these sin- 

 gular things is found to be much the same as in other vegetation. To 

 any one at all conversant with vegetable chemistry, it would be a 

 mystery indeed, how a plant with greater power of development than 

 we see anywhere else, built up of just such cells, and these of the 

 same chemical substance as in other plants, should not show the same 

 results from its vital processes in other respects as they. And thus, 

 also, very much disappears from that character of gloom aud deadliuess 

 that so many have been prone to ascribe to these innocent plants. It 

 is not, indeed, true, that they feed more than others upon decay; the 

 farmer nourishes his choicest crops with as corrupt matter as ever 

 fed a fetid toadstool, and we think no harm of it. The glossy gold- 

 thread and the fragrant twinflower prefer as deep shadows as these, 

 but no one thinks them deadly. The whole of this talk about asso- 

 ciating fungi, aud death, and charnel-houses, is but a relic of the old 



