64 
future advocate of this theory may quote this figure as a confirmation of his views. 
We may go year after year to particular old tree stumps and find the same species 
flourishing on it ; certain pastures in our own neighbourhood are well known for 
the production of mushrooms in every favourable year and even the rare cone- 
like Boletus (Strobilomyces strobilaceus), which he says never occurs two years in 
succession, he (the speaker) found last year after the Woolhope meeting, in the same 
spot, near Ludlow, in which he found it in the year preceding, and he had very 
little doubt it would be found again this year. On the whole, however, he agreed 
with his friend, and desired to give him his personal thanks for his interesting 
paper (applause). 
Dr. Butt briefly expressed the pleasure he had felt in hearing Mr. Lees’ paper. 
He doubted, however, whether their friend was quite correct in supposing that the 
members of the club were converted to his views, even in the modified form in 
which they had been expressed. He observed that Mr. Lees had given up the 
molar theory of the formation of fairyrings. The disappearance and re-appearance 
of particular species was another point on which he did not quite agree with their 
friend. He remembered a case in which the uprooting of a tree, and the consequent 
disturbance of the soil, was followed by the appearance of a fungus perfectly new 
to Britian, and which was hailed by Mr. Berkeley and other eminent mycologists 
as a treasure (applause). 
Mr. FLavELtt Epmunps, having been called upon by the President, rose and 
was received with applause. He said that he had been greatly interested with the 
paper of his old friend, which like all his other writings was full of curious facts 
valuable in themselves, and explained with great clearness. As their friend Mr. 
Steele had said, it was well worthy of the attention of all who heard it, and of 
the careful discussion which was invited. Mr. Steele’s reminiscence of former 
encounters between himself and Mr. Lees went back nearly 20 years, but his own 
reminiscences went back much further. Mr. Lees and he were friends of nearly 
thirty years’ standing : and he remembered hearing his friend deliver in the year 
1845 some most admirable lectures on the Comicalities of Trees, in which he took 
up the grotesque forms assumed by trees, and by the aid of his ever facile pencil 
and his bright and cheery humour made what would otherwise have been a dry 
subject full of life, instruction, and amusement. He was glad to find all these 
characteristics still as vigorous as ever in their friend, as his paper and his sketches 
that evening abundantly proved (applause). He felt almost inclined to fling at 
him a well worn Latin quotation, but that he had a bit of a quarrel with the first 
and the last words of it. The Roman poet had said Forsan hee olim meminisse 
juvabit ; but whether he thought of his friend’s past contributions to natural his- 
tory, or meetings like the present which he had helped to make pleasant, he dis- 
puted both the forsan and the future tense of the verb. There is no perhaps in 
the matter : it actually does now delight us to remember these things (applause). 
At the same time he must not be supposed as concurring in the supposition that 
the members of the Woolhope Club had been generally converted to Mr. Lees’ 
theory of the formation of fairy rings, either in its former or its present form, 
