OF THE FUNGI. 41 



compass of a square furlong. The same author tells us, 

 that he has counted above 10,000,000 of sporules in a 

 single individual of the Reticularia maxima, so minute 

 as to look like smoke as they rose in the air. 



Webster, when writing of the malignant fever of 1795, 

 informs us that sound potatoes from market perished in 

 his cellar, in thirty-six hours; and we know now how 

 they ^perished. It was a parasitic death. 



In the Philosophical Transactions, Lond. (vol. iv. p. 

 308, Abridg.), it is stated, that a green mould attacked a 

 split melon, and took three hours to sprout, and six to 

 ripen and produce, and let fall new seeds. 



At New York, the pestilential season of 1798, Webster 

 says, that he saw a cotton garment covered with dark gray- 

 colored spots of mildew in a single night, and that such 

 events were then and there common. 



I might multiply examples of the rapid growth and ex- 

 tensive diffusion of fungi, which, like the lowest classes of 

 animals, seem to have a power of development and propa- 

 gation inversely as their magnitude. The more minute 

 the plants, the more rapid their multiplication ; until, as 

 they descend to those of the smallest scale, a microscope 

 shows them in even visible growth. Nothing astonishes 

 one more than to see in the bottom of a watch glass a drop 

 of yeast swelling up, as the torula cerevisise unfolds itself, 

 and exhibits a forest of fungi, where but a few minutes 

 before, only a spore or two were visible. 



"The family of the funguses," says Badham, "is im- 

 mense. Merely catalogued and described, there are suf- 

 ficient to fill an octavo volume of four hundred pages of 

 close print, of British species alone. Altogether there 

 cannot be less than five thousand recognized species at 



present known, and each year adds new ones to the list. 



4* 



