40 HABITUDES 



A mushroom growth is proverbial in every language. 

 In a single night, under favorable circumstances, leather, 

 or moist vegetable matter, may be completely covered 

 with mould. Of the more minute fungi, some species 

 pass through their whole existence in a few minutes, from 

 the invisible spore to the perfect plant. Lind says, that 

 the first rains in Guinea have been known to make the 

 leather of shoes quite mouldy and rotten in forty-eight 

 hours; showing that the plants which disorganize the 

 leather must have drawn their nutrition, even from its 

 heart, in that time, and, by many successive generations, 

 extended themselves over its total surface. Mr. Berkeley 

 describes a Polyporus squamosus which, in three weeks, 

 acquired a circumference of seven feet five inches, and a 

 weight of thirty-four pounds. The Polyporus frondosus 

 described by John Bapt. Porta, sometimes transcends a 

 weight of twelve pounds in a few days. 



The Sovista giganteum, on the authority of Carpenter, 

 the eminent physiologist, has been known to increase in a 

 single night, from a mere point to the size of a large 

 gourd, estimated to. contain four thousand seven hundred 

 millions of cells; a number which, when counted at the 

 rapid rate of 300 per minute, or five per second, would 

 take the whole time of one person, night and day , for three 

 hundred years. A square mile contains upwards of 

 3,000,000 square yards, or 27,000,000 square feet, so 

 that a single Bovista giganteum may present, at evening, 

 an almost invisible single cell, and yet place before morn- 

 ing, nearly 1,800 such cells in' every square foot of a 

 square mile. 



Notwithstanding the wondrous productions of a single 

 individual of one species, Fries, the Swedish naturalist, 

 observed not less than two thousand species, within the 



