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METHODS OF EEPEODUCTION IN FUNGI. 

 [By Wm. Phillips, F.L.S.] 



I have thought it may not be out of place to ask your attention for a few minutes 

 this evening to some of the methods of reproduction amongst fungi, a class of 

 plants the life-history of which presents to us many curious phenomena, which 

 have only quite lately^that is within the last half century — received from 

 botanists the attention they deserve. Fungi are distinguished from nearly all 

 other plants by the total absence of chlorophyll in their comi)osition. One or two 

 species are of a dark-green colour, as, for example, Agaricus ceruginosus and 

 Peziza ceruginosa, but they owe their green colour to a substance entirely un- 

 explained up to the present time and totallj' dififerent from chlorophyll. Another 

 character of fungi is that they are for the most jiart saprojjhytes or parasites, i.e., 

 they either live on the decaying tissues of other plants, or they live at the exjiense 

 of living plants. It is to this last-named group that some of the most dreadful 

 pests belong which cause such destruction in our fields and gardens, as the 

 mildew of wheat, the vine mildew, and the potato disease. The origin and 

 growth of fungi were at one time regarded as inscrutable mysteries into which it 

 was vain and even presumptuous to inquire, and most of them were supposed to 

 originate from spontaneous generation. Indeed this last doctrine died an ex- 

 ceedingly hard death, Dr. Bastian having been its latest champion. Every 

 vegetable organism is now believed to arise from a germ or spore, either of sexual 

 or asexual origin, although the exact method of the production of such germ or 

 spore may not yet have been in all species discovered. In the great domain of Fungi 

 considerable advances have been made of late in our knowledge of their structure 

 and life history, but still only the very fringe of the great continent has been 

 explored, and even that fringe only partially. The large division Hymenomycetes, 

 to which the mushroom belongs, is represented in this country by about 850 

 species, or, in the whole of Europe, by more than 1,800 species. What we know 

 of their mode of reproduction may be summarised in a few words. If we take a 

 full-grown mushroom we see it is composed of a stem, and a cap or pileus ; under 

 the pileus we see a number of thin lamella; or gills radiating from the centre to 

 the circumference, which are at first white, then pink, and at length purple-brown. 

 It is on the surface of these gills that the reproductive bodies are produced in 

 enormous numbers after this fashion : — Growing out from the surface, and per- 

 pendicular to it, are a number of club-shaped cells, called basidia, arranged in 

 close order, forming a continuous layer, called the hymenial layer. On the sumn)it 

 of each basidium are two short spikes, called sterigmata, on the points of which 

 are produced the spores, each sterigma bearing a spore. The spores are elliptic, 

 purplish -blactk in a mass, and produced in enormous numbers. (Let any one place 

 the cap of a mushroom on a sheet of white paper, with the gills downwards, and 

 he will find after a few hours that innumerable spores have fallen, and imprinted 

 on the paper the outline of every gill. Should these spores fall on a congenial 



