58 Minnesota Plant Life. 



under side. In the Minnesota woods there are a great number 

 of different kinds of pore-fungi which show characteristic dif- 

 ferences of shape, size, thickness, color, texture, and endurance. 

 One of them, called the sulphur-colored pore-fungus, which 

 grows in very large masses is edible when young, but the great 

 majority of them while not poisonous, are too tough, leathery 

 and woody to be very appetizing. Some of them, indeed, no- 

 tably the great shelves a foot or more across which occur upon 

 oak trees, are almost as solid as the wood of the tree itself. 



Upon one occasion I noticed that in the pores of the under 

 side of one of these fungi, a large number of mosquitoes had 

 been caught by their legs and had afterwards been covered by 

 a growth of cottony filaments of the fungus, and I wondered 

 whether the plant might not derive some benefit from its ap- 

 parent capture of insects and digestion of their bodies. It is 

 not at all clear, however, that such a fungus should be included 

 in the great category of flesh-eating plants, because it is a com- 

 mon habit of the fruit-body to inclose small objects which 

 chance to be in its way. Sometimes when these shelf-fungi 

 grow near the ground they will be found with grass leaves pen- 

 etrating them and in such cases it is not to be supposed that the 

 grass leaf has grown through the fungus, but rather that the 

 fungus has grown around and has enclosed the leaf. 



The pores of these interesting fungi are of different sizes and 

 shapes. In some varieties they are almost invisible, they are 

 so small. Other sorts have the pores much larger. In some 

 the pores are circular, in others they are hexagonal or irregular 

 in shape. In one kind which is common upon willows, form- 

 ing fruit-bodies not more than two or three inches across, the 

 pores are labyrinthine in shape, like the passages in the puzzle- 

 gardens which are sometimes laid out in parks. There is con- 

 siderable difference too in the upper surface of pore-fungi. 

 Some of them are white and smooth as in the birch-tree form, 

 while others are fuzzy. Some are hard and marked by annual 

 rings showing where the growth of each year has jutted out 

 beyond the growth of the previous year. Some are sticky, but 

 rarely slimy in texture ; some are cartilaginous or horny to the 

 touch, and many are spongy and soft. 



