FUNGI. 297 
too sweet for immediate use, was allowed to stand 
unmolested for several years. The door in this 
case was blocked up and barricaded by the mon- 
strous growth ; and when forcible entrance was 
obtained, the whole cellar was found completely 
filled ; the cask which had caused the vegetable 
revel, drained of its contents, being triumphantly 
elevated to the roof, as it were, upon the shoulders 
of the bacchanalian fungi. 
Rapidity of growth in fungi is necessarily fol- 
lowed by rapidity of decay. Though some of the 
larger and more corky species last throughout the 
summer, autumn, and winter, and a few are per- 
ennial, growing on the same trunk for many years, 
slowly and almost insensibly adding layer to layer, 
and attaining an enormous size, yet the vast gene- 
rality of fungi are very fugacious, They are the 
ephemera of the vegetable kingdom. The entire 
life of most of the species ranges from four days 
to a fortnight or a month ; while there are nume- 
rous microscopic species of the mould family 
whose lives are so brief and evanescent as scarcely 
to allow sufficient time to make drawings of their 
forms. What a contrast there is between the 
minute Bread-mould at the bottom of the scale, 
and the gigantic Wellingtonia of the Californian 
forests at the top! The one during the warm 
moist weather of summer appears suddenly, as if 
