Minnesota Plant Life. 



63 



selves sometimes nearly a foot into the air, and provided with 

 basin-shaped caps, six inches or more in diameter. Another 

 overgrown form is common on decaying timber and has no 

 central stalk but stands out somewhat like a bracket-shelf. 



Deliquescent mushrooms. Not all of the fungi with radiat- 

 ing gills on the under side are classed by botanists as true mush- 

 rooms. One sort, which comes up in the autumn, late in Sep- 

 tember or in October, oozes into a black and filthy slime as it 

 matures. When young the fruit-body is elongated, an inch or 

 so in diameter, sometimes four inches in length, white in color, 

 with blackish scale markings. In its early stages when properly 



Fig. 21. — Common edible mushroom. After Atkinson. Bull. 138, Cornell Ag. Exp. Station. 



cooked this is one of the most delicious of edible fungi ; but 

 after it has begun to decay it is neither appetizing nor healthful. 

 The habit that these mushroom-like fungi have of decaying is 

 a device for scattering their spores. They are visited by insects 

 and the spores are picked up in the general slime to which their 

 presence gives the black color, and are then carried away to be 

 deposited elsewhere. 



Miniature mushrooms. Another relative of the true mush- 

 room is a very delicate little plant an inch or less in height 

 growing upon decaying leaves in the forest or in wooded ra- 

 vines. It has a shiny black cartilaginous stem like that of the 

 maiden-hair fern and upon the top of this a white cap displays 



