VARIOUS OBSERVATIONS 69 



a handful of the slices, soaks them in water, boils them for a short 

 time to soften them, and then fries them in butter for a few minutes. 

 For this particular immigrant the parasitised Lactarii afforded a 

 favourite food, and he said that he would rather have a dish of them 

 than a good sirloin steak. I suspect, however, that the last state- 

 ment proceeded from pride of special culinary knowledge and was 

 intended rather to impress the hearer than to convey exact 

 truth. I myself have eaten of the fungus. I find it pleasant to 

 the taste but not so good as the Field Mushroom (Psalliota 

 campestris). 



Sterile Fruit-bodies. Already in Volume I, some remarks were 

 made upon the occasional sterility of Coprinus fruit-bodies. It 

 was pointed out that certain fruit-bodies which otherwise appear 

 to undergo perfectly normal development, fail in their essential 

 function of producing spores. 1 



Occasional sterility of fruit-bodies seems to be a phenomenon 

 by no means limited to the Coprini but to be widely spread 

 throughout the Hymenomycetes. The first observations concern- 

 ing it were made by Leveille upon Lactarius vellereus in his classical 

 researches on the structure of the hymenium. He says : " Once 

 I found a complete abortion of the organs of fructification in 

 Agaricus vellereus ; the surface (of the hymenium) was smooth, 

 and uniform, and exhibited neither basidia nor cystidia. It was 

 quite impossible to find spores or any bodies comparable with these 

 organs." 2 Stevenson remarks that Stropharia obturata Fr. has 

 gills which " often become sterile and remain white, so that it may 

 be easily taken for a species of Armillaria." 3 The so-called 

 Clitocybe Sadleri, represented in Plate 127 of Cooke's Illustrations, 

 which has lemon-yellow gills, is now generally recognised as being 

 nothing more than a sterile form of Hypholoma fasciculare. It 

 has been found by Miss E. M. Wakefield and W. B. Grove not 

 infrequently on stumps in the herbaceous grounds of Kew Gardens. 4 

 Fries states that in Russula Integra the gills are sometimes quite 



1 A. H. R. Buller, Researches on Fungi, vol. i, 1909, pp. 15-17. 



2 J. M. H. Leveille, " Recherches sur I'Hymenium des Champignons," Ann. 

 Sci. Nat., 2 ser., Botanique, T. VIII, 1837, p. 327. 



3 J. Stevenson, British Fungi (Hymenomycetes), vol. i, p. 311. 



4 Cf. Massee, British Fungus-Flora, vol. ii, p. 442. 



