113 



during their winter sleep the fungi have been silently elaborating the 

 proper vegetable elements, have changed the useless withered leaf and 

 hard block into rich mould, and have thus made provision for the 

 leaves and flowers of spring. 



In the course of forming a collection of specimens in any 

 branch of natural historj'-, much time is necessarily spent in the 

 study of descriptions indicating points of difference between closely 

 allied species, and seldom even touching upon the higher and 

 more interesting distinctions which separate the larger groups. 

 These minute details, which have again and again to be consulted 

 and examined, and compared, before its proper place in the series 

 can be assigned to any unfamiliar species, are often felt to be un- 

 profitable and wearisome. Yet there is something in the habits of 

 many of the fungi calculated to give an unusual zest even to such dry 

 dictionary work as this. Their growth is peculiarly capricious ; at all 

 events it seems to be so, and they come and go, no one can tell how or 

 why. Take for example some of the smaller agarics — little fragile 

 plants which appear like the foundlings of nature. You find upon 

 the lawn, some bright morning in autumn, a vegetable form so slender 

 that it trembles with a breath, and its head droops under the weight of 

 the drops of dew with which it is studded. It is a stranger, and its 

 stay will hardly be prolonged till noon. So fleeting and fairy-like an 

 object might well be thought nothing more than a gem cast off by 

 nature in a sportive mood. Yet the oak or the palm is not more true 

 to its kind. Take your book and search till you find its description : 

 every portion will correspond, — the texture of the stem, the form of the 

 hymenium, even the colour and shape of the minute spores are all exactly 

 recoi'ded. It was to you a stranger, but some observer of nature, perhaps 

 years before and hundreds of miles away, had found a little dewy plant 

 upon his grass plot in the morning, had written its description and 

 given it a name. You are looking on the beauties that he too saw and 

 admired, for the plants though so far distant had a common parent, and 

 sprang from the same stock. That can hardly be a dry description 

 which affords so pleasant a sympathy. 



Recent investigations have made it all but certain that every species 

 of fungus is produced in strict accordance with the laws which regulate 

 the distribution of other plants. It is admitted that no plant can be 

 produced without the previous presence of some portion of a plant of 

 the same species. The portion may be a seed, or a bud, or a piece of 

 the stem, or of a leaf, or a fibre of the root : it affects not our present 

 argument what portion, but sorao reproductive particle of a parent plant 

 must, under all circumstances, originate tlio growth of another plant 



