Notes ON WINTER BOTANY. 13 
perhaps, is the specialisation shown by some of the Ascomycetes. 
We find that on Vaccinium, for instance, there are 2 sp. 
of Phacidium and one of Crumenula. On beechmast there grow 
—Hymenoscypha 1 sp., Helotium 1 sp., and Lachnella 2 sp. ; 
whilst upon Castanea cups a Lachnella has been found. These 
forms have not, so far as I know, been discovered elsewhere, 
except just upon those particular substances. 
On the other hand, others occur on widely different plants, 
on the wood of many different trees or on all sorts of herbaceous 
stems. ‘There are also cases in which these saprophytic minute 
fungi attack closely related plants such as Poplar and Willow. 
All this resembles very closely what we find in the flowering 
plants, and is most easily explained by the simple supposition that 
the ancestors of any given Discomycete have, during the whole 
course of the evolution of, for example, Castanea, continued to 
live on Castanea, dividing from their relations on beechmast and 
acorn, at the time those trees were differentiated. 
The spores are in some cases certainly distributed by insects. 
Take, e.g., Typhula Grevillei between dead leaves lying flat 
upon one another. Surely no explanation is possible except that 
insects or animals, probably worms, devour the fungus and 
deposit the spores in their casts. Nor, I think, can we help the 
belief that insects must generally introduce the spores of 
Discomycetes under the bark of a dead twig. The exposed ring 
of infectible tissue is not only very narrow but in most cases it is 
vertical, and the chance falling of a spore exactly at the right 
spot seems exceedingly unlikely. 
On the other hand, an insect which touches a Typhula in 
the dead leaves, or which is leaving beechmast or dead logs, will 
very probably proceed to visit other dead leaves, beechmast or 
dead twigs. The probability of infection is obviously enormously 
greater than that of purely chance infection by wind. Insects 
undoubtedly do visit both large and small fungi, although 
observation of insect visits on very minute Lachnellas, etc., is an 
exceedingly difficult matter. 
I do not mean to imply that the wind is not utilised. Indeed, 
special arrangements for darting out or ejaculating spores are by 
no means unusual, as in the Puffball, Peziza, Barya, Ascobolus, 
etc. Falk has also explained how, in the common agarics, the 
spores dropping from the under surface of the hat are caught up 
