ARCYRIA 251 



This beautiful species is easily known by its comparatively large 

 size, peculiar, obovate shape, its brilliant color, and unusually per- 

 sistent membranous cal_vculus. It is peculiar to the western part of 

 North America, South Dakota west to the Pacific Ocean. 



South Dakota, Colorado, California, Washington. 



In the thin-covered mountains of Colorado, or hidden by the still 

 drier thickets and woods of Southern Californa, the fruit of this 

 species is small, somewhat as the clavate hemitrichia, pure, deep 

 yellow, golden or vitelline as Phillips says; but at loftier altitudes 

 in the ever cool forests on the high mountain flanks, beginning away 

 up where the glacier first starts to crack and slide between the 

 'cleavers', and forests of stunted white-stemmed pine or wooly-fruited 

 fir throw down their twigs and foliage undisturbed through centuries, 

 — on down to where the plowing ice forgets its thrust, and melts 

 to gentle floods amid spruce and hemlock-groves, — all the way the 

 beautiful versicolor spreads and fruits, in August and September in 

 all the richness of color which its name implies, which Phillips saw, 

 tints of red, and yellow, and olive, and green, not brilliant, but in all 

 the softer shades the artists love, weaving, in far-spread strands of 

 tufted cylinders and cones upturned, fair as flowers, dusky garlands, 

 by sunlight long forgot! Did not the old-time botanists liken these 

 things once and again, to flowers! 



5. Arcyria incarnata Persoon. 



1786. Clathrus adnatus Batsch, Elench. Fung., 141. (?) 

 1791. Arcyria incarnata Pers., Gmel., Syst. Nat., II., 1467. 



Sporangia closely crowded, cylindric, 1-1.5 mm. high, rosy or 

 flesh-colored, stipitate or almost sessile; stipe generally short, some- 

 times barely a conical point beneath the calyculus; hypothallus none; 

 peridium wholly evanescent, except the shallow, saucer-like, inwardly 

 roughened calyculus; capillitium loose, broad, pale reddish, attached 

 to the cup at the centre only by strands which enter the hollow stem, 

 the threads adorned with transverse plates, cogs, ridges, etc., arrang- 

 ed in an open spiral ; spore-mass rosy, spores by transmitted light 

 colorless, nearly smooth, 7—8 /x. 



This common species is well marked both by its color and by the 



