Annals 
о 
Missouri Botanical Garden 
Vor. 3 NOVEMBER, 1916 No. 4 
PISTILLARIA (SUBG. PISTILLINA) THAXTERI, 
BURT N. ӨР. 
THE SMALLEST KNown HyMENOMYCETE 
EDWARD ANGUS BURT 
Mycologist and Librarian to the Missouri Botanical Garden 
Associate Professor in the Henry Shaw School of Botany of 
Гази оп University 
On a recent visit to Ше Mycological Herbarium of Harvard 
University, I was given for study by Professor Thaxter a 
curious fungus, collected at West Haven, Connecticut, in 1888. 
This fungus is a hymenomycete of very simple structure and 
exceedingly minute size — so minute that the fructifications 
are not visible to the naked eye unless rendered so by special 
illumination and background, as in the case of the dust 
particles of the air becoming visible in a beam of sunlight 
thrown across a darkened room. 
By the aid of a lens the fructifications may be seen scat- 
tered on the surface of very rotten wood, merely gregarious, 
not united into clusters. One hundred and fifteen have been 
counted on an area 2 em. long by 4 em. broad. The fructifica- 
tions, after being kept twenty-eight years in the herbarium, are 
whitish to cartridge-buff throughout; each has a subglobose 
head, the pileus supported on a slender stem, and in its form 
suggests the sporangium of a minute myxomycete, such as a 
Physarum. In figs. 1 and 2 are shown two fructifications 
under magnification of 63 diameters; in fig. 1 these fructifica- 
tions were sketehed in dry condition, as they were on the 
! [ssued January 12, 1917. 
ANN. Mo. Bor. GARD., Vor. 3, 1916 (403) 
