MUSHROOMS. 23 



words, what sort of a plant develops from a spore aud where 

 does it live? If you could follow, as you may under a micro- 

 scope, the germination of a spore, and the stages of growth 

 which follow, your eyes would give you the answer to the first 

 part of this question. You would see the minute spherical or 

 ellipsoid bodies, when supplied with the requisite moisture, burst 

 and put forth slender colorless threads called hijphcu. These in 

 time branch again and again, extending constantly in length to 

 form what is called the mycelium, or vegetative part of the 

 plant. When such threads are massed together in strands, form- 

 ing white lace-work or cottony bunches, they are easily found in 

 the substratum on which the fungus grows — in rotten Avood, 

 for instance, or in a heap of leaves, or other decaying vegetable 

 matter. In such places the mycelium spreads over or permeates 

 the substance from which it draws its food supply. For fungi do 

 not elaborate their food from raw materials as do the plants that 

 have green coloring matter, but are dependent upon other vege- 

 table or animal organisms, either living or dead; that is, they are 

 parasites, or saprophytes. 



What is known by mushroom-growers as the spawn consists of 

 a dried compressed portion of a mushroom bed, generally mixed 

 straw and horse droppings, which is permeated by the mycelium. 

 In this condition, in the form of flakes or bricks, it may be trans- 

 ported, and will keep its vitality for months, active growth being 

 for the time arrested. As a rule, then, when mushroom beds are 

 started, it is the mycelium or spawn which is planted — not 

 the spores. When the proper conditions of warmth and moisture 

 are supplied, growth is resumed, and the threads, lengthening, 

 branching, and anastomosing, very soon spread throughout the bed. 



It is plain, then, that the mushroom plant for most of its life 

 is out of sight, and consequently not familiarly known. To this 

 fact are due .many erroneous notions about the origin of mush- 

 rooms themselves. When the time has come for the plant to pro- 

 duce its fruit, there form at various points in the mycelium small 

 masses of densely branching interwoven threads, which in time 

 enlarge to an appreciable size. Each of these masses is the be- 

 ginning of a button, or nascent mushroom. An examination of 

 buttons in various stages of growth, by means of thin sections 

 brought into the field of a compound microscope, show^s pretty 

 •clearlj^ the part played by the hyphfe in the mushroom proper, the 



