522 



THE MUSHBOOM FAMILY. 



minute whitish, brown, or orange-coloured dots or blotches, which on 

 being magnified, resolve into elegant filamentous tufts or clusters of 

 tubercles. They are frequently generated beneath the skin of the 

 plant, bursting through it, when ready, like an eruption. Not only- 

 are the Fungi inhabitants of the open air ; many kinds grow in cellars, 

 caverns, railway tunnels, and other dark places, often spreading over 

 the walls as a circular patch of velvety and coloured film, and in the case 

 of the smaller kinds, often growing sideways or downwards, — a direc- 

 tion never taken by any other kind of j)lants, except when too slender 

 to stand erect. Whatever their habitat, and whether large or small, 

 it would seem that their growth is immediately checked by the intro- 



rt"\f"^l^,. 



Fig. 231. 

 Agaricus muscarius. 



Fig. 2o-,. 

 Crimson Dryad's cup (Peztza coccinea). 



duction of some kind of perfume. Many species of the family are 

 violently poisonous ; in some the odour is delicious ; others have a 

 smell absolutely intolerable. The poisonous species arc with difficulty 

 told from the edible, rendering it very unwise to meddle with any 

 except the common mushroom. If the odour be amraoniacal, and the 

 taste pungent, they are probably poisonous, and the same if the colour 

 be any shade of green, black, or purple, especially if the fungus be 

 mature, and growing in a damp and shady place. 



The fructification of these curious plants is exceedingly simple. In 

 the Agarics, represented in the common mushroom, it lies in the 

 " hymenium," — that beautiful set of thin vertical plates, often with 

 shorter ones in the interstices, which radiates from the summit of the 



