198 FOOTNOTES FROM 



complexion to the whole tribe. In consequence of this 

 habit, they are the most sombre of all plants, the neutral 

 tints prevailing, to the almost total exclusion of the 

 bright vivid hues of the families of flowers. Green, 

 which is the most frequent of all colours, the household 

 dress of our mother earth, predominant not only in 

 trees, herbs, and grasses, but even in ferns, mosses, 

 lichens, and algae, is almost unknown in the fungi, most 

 of which are of a pale, etiolated, sickly hue. 



Another of the remarkable peculiarities of the fungi 

 is the extreme rapidity of their growth, a peculiarity more 

 frequently to be seen among the lowest forms of animal 

 life than among plants. They seem special miracles of 

 nature, rising from the ground, or from the decaying 

 trunk of the tree, full-formed and complete in all their 

 parts in a single night, like Minerva from the head of 

 Jupiter, or the armed soldiers from the dragon's teeth of 

 Cadmus, sown in the furrows of Colchis. It has long 

 been known that the growth of fucgi takes place with 

 great rapidity during thundery weather, owing, in all 

 probability, to the nitrogenized products of the rain which 

 then falls. One is surprised after a thunderstorm in the 

 beginning of August, or a day of warm, moist, misty 

 weather, such as often occurs in September, to see in the 

 woods thick clusters of these plants, which had sprung 

 into existence in the short space of twenty-four hours, 

 covering almost every decayed stump and rotten tree. 

 In tropical countries, stimulated by the intense heat and 

 light, the rapidity of vegetable growth is truly astonish- 

 ing ; the stout, woody stem of the bamboo-cane, for 

 instance, shooting up in the dense jungles of India at 



