268 THE RING OF NATURE 



they themselves are food. The last train takes 

 up the rails behind it, and they, too, are poured 

 into the bulbous mass at headquarters. Writing 

 of the parasol fungus that commonly decorates 

 our hotbeds, Kerner says that it is elaborated, 

 fructifies, and passes to deliquescence all in the 

 space of twenty-four hours. He adds that the 

 fruit must be many times the weight of the 

 mycelium that produces it. But how many times 

 more elaborate. The perfect bee does not weigh 

 nearly so much as the grub from which it grows, 

 nor that grub so much as the food it lived upon. 

 If the fungus weighs only three times as much as 

 the mycelium, it may be said to represent it in 

 complexity many more times than that. 



The mystery of the fungus is exceedingly old. 

 Not so old as the flowers, for all the fungi live on 

 dead organic matter, mostly vegetable. Evidence 

 of their antiquity need not depend on the geological 

 records, although these soft and highly perishable 

 bodies have had their monuments carved in the 

 rocks, and the proverbial fly in amber has been 

 found to be infected with the threads of such 

 a mycelium as destroys them in millions every 

 autumn now. The enormous number of species, 

 genera, tribes, and orders into which the toad- 

 stools, moulds, ferments, and others naturally 

 divide themselves are evidence just as unequivocal 

 of the millions of years that they have existed 

 on the planet. 



Considering how much the gourmets enjoy an 



