CURRENT LITERATURE 
BOOK REVIEWS 
Researches on fungi 
t might seem that the study of spore dispersal among the fungi offered 
little opportunity for important investigation, but the perusal of BULLER’s 
recent volume on the subject shows how surprisingly little we really knew 
about the matter before he began his researches. The results of many years 
of patient investigation are now brought together in an elaborate manner, and 
it is safe to say that only once in a while is it possible to find a volume which 
contains so much that is new to botanists. One hardly, knows whether to 
admire most the many new contributions, the ingenious mechanical contriv- 
ances which made the contributions possible, or the limitless patience which 
Professor BULLER has shown in working out the uttermost details of his sub- 
ject. Although some of the results here given have been published in various 
papers, no attempt will be made in this review to distinguish between such 
results and those given for the first time, though most come under the latter 
head. 
After some chapters which review the chief features of the reproductive 
organs of the Hymenomycetes, BULLER gives an account of his experiments 
which show that the fruiting bodies of these plants are “adjusted” in a most 
remarkable manner to spore dispersal. In the first place, the apogeotropic 
stipes exhibit the swaying movements that are so familiar in the shoots of seed 
plants; in one case there was noted a curvature through an arc of go° in 18 
minutes. It is shown also that the gills exhibit geotropic reactions. As a 
result of the geotropic curvatures of the stipe, and of the gills, the latter are 
strictly vertical when in a state of equilibrium; the great advantage of such 
reactions is that they permit the fall of the spores between the gills (or through 
the tubes in the case of the polypores). In some cases, but not in all, light as 
well as gravity stimulates stipe curvatures. Careful estimates are made of 
the number of spores and of their rate of fall in various fruit-bodies, and 
although everyone knows that the spores are very numerous, the numbers 
given by BULLER seem almost unbelievable. For example, in a fruit of 
Agaricus campestris there were estimated to be 1,800,000,000 spores, and as they 
took two days to shed, they dispersed at the rate of 40,000,000 per hour. In 
‘Hires , A. H. Recrnarp, Researches on fungi; an account of the production, 
liberation, iad dispersion of the spores of Hymenomycetes treated botanically and 
Physically. Medium 8vo. pp. xi+287. ss s i 83. London, New York, Bombay, 
and Calcutta: Longmans, Green and 12s. 6d. 
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