278 EDIBLE MUSHROOMS 



A week ago this glistening gray bag, so free with 

 its dust-puff at the slightest touch, was solid in sub- 

 stance and as white as cottage cheese in the fracture. 

 In this condition, sliced and fried, it would have 

 proven a veritable delicacy upon our table, quite sug- 

 gesting an omelet in consistency and flavor, and in 

 size also, if perchance we had been favored with 

 one of the larger specimens, which frequently ap- 

 proaches the dimensions of a football. 



But in a later stage this clear white fracture would 

 have appeared speckled or peppered with gray spots 

 (see page 271), and the next day entire- 

 Development ly gray and much softened, and, later 

 of spores again, brown and apparently in a state 

 of decay. But this is not decay. This 

 moist brown mass by evaporation becomes powdery, 

 and the Puff-ball is now ripe, and preparing for 

 posterity. 



Each successive squeeze, as we hold it between our 

 fingers, yields its generous response in a puff of 

 brown smoke, which melts away apparently into air. 

 But the Puff-ball does not thus end in mere smoke. 

 This vanishing purple cloud is com- 

 Buoyant posed of tiny atoms, so extremely mi- 

 spore=atoms nute as to require the aid of a powerful 

 microscope to reveal their shapes. Each 

 one of these atoms, so immaterial and buoyant as to 

 be almost without gravity, floating away upon the 

 slightest breath, or even wafted upward by cur- 

 rents of warm air from the heated earth, has with- 

 in itself the power of reproducing another clump of 

 Puff-balls, if only fortune shall finally lodge it in con- 



