!H 4 THE STORY-BOOK OF SCIENCE 



wandering hen. Others were glossy red, others 

 bright fawn-color, and still others brilliant yellow. 

 Some, just coming out of the ground, were envel- 

 oped in a kind of bag that tears open as the mush- 

 room grows; some, more advanced, spread out like 

 an open umbrella. Finally, there were many that 

 had already begun to decay. In their fetid rotten- 

 ness swarmed innumerable grubs, which later would 

 become insects. After picking a number of the prin- 

 cipal kinds, the party sat down at the foot of a beech, 

 on the soft moss-carpet, and Uncle Paul spoke thus : 



"A mushroom is the blossom of a plant that lives 

 under ground and is called by learned men mycelium. 

 This subterranean plant is composed of white, slen- 

 der, fragile threads, resembling in their entirety a 

 large cobweb. If you pull up a mushroom carefully 

 you will see at the base of its stalk, in the earth that 

 clings to it, numerous white threads of the mycelium. 

 Let us imagine a rose-bush planted so as to leave 

 nothing but the roses above ground. The buried 

 bush will represent the subterranean mycelium; the 

 roses, open to the air, will represent the blossoms of 

 the mycelium, that is to say the mushrooms. " 



"A rosebush, " objected Jules, "has stout branches 

 covered with leaves ; the mushroom-plant, according 

 to what I see, has nothing of the sort. It is a kind 

 of moldiness that branches out in the ground in 

 white veins. " 



"Those white veins, so delicate that one can 

 hardly touch them without breaking them, form the 

 subterranean plant, without leaves or roots. They 

 lengthen little by little in the ground to a pretty good 



