222 Transactions British Mycological Society. 
was not affected by the origin of the mycelium; for the mycelium, 
whether it originated from one spore only or from many spores, 
always grew rapidly and produced a fruit-body within a month. 
Since Coprinus sterquilinus fruits so readily in pure horse-dung 
cultures, it was thought that C. comatus—its near relative— 
might do so too. However, a series of experiments with dung 
cultures has convinced me that this supposition is erroneous. 
The fact is that, although Coprinus comatus can be caused to 
fruit in laboratory cultures, the cultures require to be made in 
a particular manner and, even then, fruit-bodies appear upon 
them only after the mycelium has been growing for several 
months. 
II. EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS. 
During the autumn of 1920 I made ten cultures of Coprinus 
comatus on large masses of sterilised horse dung contained in 
crystallising dishes covered with glass plates. One of the cul- 
tures was inoculated with spores from a spore-deposit, another 
with a small piece of a spore-laden gill taken from a fruit-body 
that was shedding spores, and the remaining eight with a small 
piece of tissue procured from the inner side of a stipe. As a 
result of these inoculations a heavy white mycelium was pro- 
duced which, in the course of 20-28 days, entirely covered the 
medium in crystallising dishes nine inches in diameter. The 
mycelium derived from the spores required a few more days to 
cover the medium than that derived from a stipe, on account 
of the fact that the spores took some time to germinate while 
the piece of tissue removed from a stipe produced rapidly 
growing hyphae immediately. Several of the mycelia developed 
heavy white cords on the under surface of the medium and one 
gave rise to woolly knots on the cords; but, although all the 
ten mycelia grew vigorously, in the end not one of them de- 
veloped fruit-bodies even of the most rudimentary kind. 
Various changes were made in the conditions of cultivation 
of the fungus in an attempt to accelerate fruit-body production. 
Some of the mycelia were placed in the dark, one in bright 
sunlight, and the rest in diffused daylight; but the results were 
all negative: no fruit-bodies appeared. 
Falck* found that fruit-body production in Merulius domes- 
ticus is accelerated in artificial cultures by a series of transfers, 
a mycelium which has just covered the medium in one vessel 
being transferred to a second vessel containing the same 
medium, and the mycelium which has just covered the medium 
in this second vessel being transferred to a third vessel, and so 
*R. Falck, Die Fruchtk6orperbildung der im Hause vorkommenden holz- 
zerstorenden Pilze in Reinkulturen und ihre Bedingungen, Mycologische 
Untersuchungen und Berichte, I, 1913, p. 62. 
