PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 
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as understood in an assthetical sense. Apart, however, from the diffi- 
culty attending their study, and the repulsiveness and superstition 
with which ignorance has wrongfully invested them — apart from their 
want of beauty or otherwise — it is of vital importance to man, in an 
economical sense, that these hitherto obscure organisms should he 
understood, in order that they may be combated. “ Their name is 
legion.” Their power for good or evil is immeasurable. Between 
them and man the battle is chronic. The struggle for existence and 
ascendency is increasing as man becomes more civilized and varied in 
his tastes. No object of man’s solicitude is safe from their attack. 
The cottage and the palace are equally in danger. The stores of 
priceless treasures that the latter contains form no ground of ex- 
emption from ruin. Man’s choicest works of art, upon which his 
brain has laboured and his wealth been lavished, are marked by the 
fungi, as a sheriff’s officer marks an insolvent debtor’s goods, for 
destruction. Thousands of objects, whether placed high in the air or 
deep down in the soil, are still within the reach of this ubiquitous 
race. Some spread themselves over our fruits before we have time to 
gather and use them ; others fill the cracks and crevices of our bread 
and cheese with the pellucid forests of pigmy trees, bowed down with 
the abundance of the fruit they bear. Our jams, pickles, and preserves, 
if not watched and defended with the greatest care, at some seasons 
are immediately stamped with their broad arrow as their own. “ When 
our beer becomes mothery,” says Dr. Badham, “ that mother of 
mischief is a fungus. If pickles acquire a bad taste, if ketchup becomes 
ropy and putrefies, funguses have a finger in it all. Their reign stops 
not here, they even prey one on another. The closed cavities of nuts 
afford concealment for some species ; others, like leeches, stick to the 
bulbs of plants, and suck them dry. Some pick timber as men pick 
oakum. More than one species has a fancy for the hoofs of horses 
and the horns of cattle, sticking to them alone.” The viscera of our 
domestic fly is liable, in autumn, to break out into vegetable tufts of 
fungous growth. In spring I have myself disinterred numerous 
caterpillars with a species of clavarias larger than themselves growing 
from their heads. And the microscopist has often to lament that one 
or more of his once most valuable objects are, by the depredations of 
some species, rendered quite worthless. Thus we see that man cannot 
well treat with indifference these simple living structures. They are 
as varied in form as they are ubiquitous in habit. They are as 
dangerous from their numbers as from the insidiousness of their 
attack. Man’s house, his clothing, and his utensils ; the air he 
breathes, the water he drinks, and the food that he eats are claimed 
by fungi, in some shape, as their inheritance ; nay, they even enter 
his mouth, and settle upon his teeth, thus boldly putting their heads 
into the lion’s mouth. Mr. Walters and Mr. Pullinger are the Castor 
and Pollux of our Society, and, armed with the microscope, and that 
still more potent weapon, human thought, they have taken to the field 
against their numerous foe, and with twin-like unanimity they have 
undertaken to reconnoitre and examine the enemy’s position and 
strength, to know and to conquer him. In concluding, let me thank 
