ON THE SEEDS OR SPORES OF FUNGI. 181 
Some seeds are a long time in germinating, and the produce 
lasts a considerable time; other seeds (as of the ephemeral 
and fragile mushroom-like fungi which a breath destroys, so 
common on dunghills or dungy ground), germinate rapidly, 
produce the perfect plant, teeming with fresh seeds, and at 
once dissolve into a few drops of inky fluid. As a rule, all 
fungi seeds grow readily on decaying substances, such as the 
half rotten leaves of trees, dead grass, rotten wood, &c.; the 
seeds of some half-dozen species never germinate elsewhere 
than on fallen fir-cones, others again on acorns or ash-keys, 
beech-nuts, or fallen and decaying twigs and branches. The 
perfect plants are evidently vegetable scavengers, whose chief 
office is to eat up and destroy all the débris of the plant world. 
Many minute insects are very fond of fungi seeds, and eat 
them up eagerly. It is almost impossible to preserve some 
spores in the herbarium, they are so attacked by minute 
creatures, who ravenously devour the fungoid sweetmeats. 
The seeds of other fungi, however, in their turn, attack insects, 
and sticking between the segments of their bodies, there germi- 
nate, transforming the juices of the insect into a spawn-like 
mass. When caterpillars bury themselves in the autumn to 
assume their chrysalis condition, the seed of a fungus finds them 
out and sucks their juices ; the fungus itself then appears above 
the ground like a small crimson club, which should be a warning 
to all caterpillars in the neighbourhood who may not yet have 
put on their chrysalis livery.* 
* By the kindness of Mr. Hardwicke we are enabled to give several 
figures illustrative of this peculiar growth of fungi. Figs. 17, 18, 19, are 
British species, attached in the one case to the chrysalis, and in the other to 
the larve, of a moth: the first is Zorrubia militaris, the second and third 
T. entomorrhiza. Some foreign species of this genus attain a great size: fig. 
15 represents one found in Tasmania (7. Gunnii). The most remarkable of 
all, however, is the New Zealand 7. Robertsii (fig. 16 c), parasitic upon a 
species of Swift moth (Zepialus virescens). It has been erroneously supposed 
that the horn, with which we are all familiar on the larva and pupe of the 
Sphinges or Hawkmoths (fig. 16 a and b), was in reality the germ of a fungus, 
but this is incorrect, as the Zorrubia is not parasitic upon a Sphinz at all. 
Withering speaks of 7. entomorrhiza as having been found ‘on the dead 
laryze of insects in woods near Bulstrode, Buckinghamshire.” For further 
information on these interesting productions we refer our readers to Science 
Gossip for 1866, pp. 127, 176.—Eb. 
