428 FIRST FORMS OF VEGETATION. 
One species looks like a ruby cup; another is 
embossed with stars; while the leaves and the 
grasses of the woods and fields often form niduses 
for some of the loveliest and strangest forms, which 
our great Creator has scattered over the earth 
with lavish hand to delight the intelligent eye. 
Mrs. Hussey in this country has illustrated the 
higher tribes with a beauty and grace which leave 
nothing to be desired; while the Memoirs of 
lower species by the brothers Tulasne in France 
are adorned with the most exquisite engravings 
which art has ever produced. No natural objects 
lend themselves so appropriately for purposes of 
pictorial embellishment as fungi; while, with the 
exercise of a little taste in grouping, they might 
be made exceedingly effective at flower-shows, 
and in the adornment of the drawing-room in the 
appropriate season. Some of the most picturesque 
and attractive forms in the whole vegetable king- 
dom are found in the genus Geaster resembling 
star-fishes and sea-urchins ; while the Aseroé rubra, 
with its bright forked rays of a bright scarlet 
above, and pale rose below, and its large central 
aperture in the disk, looks lovelier than any sea- 
anemone. 
There is not in nature a more picturesque object 
to the painter, or a more interesting study to the 
botanist, than the old decaying stump of a tree in 
