The Homes and Habits of Fungi 
decaying ring of fungi temporarily stimulates the grass around it, 
so that its rich colour stands out in circles or arcs of circles against 
the less highly nourished grass. Such rings are conspicuous on 
the lawns of the White House at Washington, and are often to 
be seen well defined on distant hillsides. 
Brackets and mushrooms and puffballs grow in warm, moist 
places where they find decaying wood and leaves to feed upon. 
Old tree trunks and fallen logs, rich leaf mould, and cattle pastures 
are their favourite haunts. 
The reason for their choice of place is invariably connected 
with the question of food, for fungi can thrive only where they 
can obtain organic matter, as they have lost the power which all 
green plants have of feeding on inorganic or mineral matter. All 
plants must have food with which to form plant flesh. Green 
plants by means of their leaf green—the only agent in the world 
which has the power to turn lifeless mineral matter into living 
matter—take the element carbon from the air, and hydrogen gas 
and oxygen gas from water, and with their green granules, by some 
mysterious process, make of the elements hydrogen, oxygen, and 
carbon, compounds of wood and starch and sugar. Fungus plants 
have none of this leaf green and must therefore feed on material 
which has been manufactured by green plants. 
To define fungi simply, so as to include all the varieties, would 
be a difficult task ; but in general it may be said that they are 
plants which have no leaf green and which do not grow from true 
seeds, but from dustlike bodies resembling in appearance the yel- 
ae low pollen of roses or lilies. 
The fungi have no flowers and produce no 
seeds. They produce spores instead, fine dust-like 
particles, which are borne in special places on the 
mature plant, whether a mould or mildew, a toad- 
stool, puffball, or bracket. The cap of a mush- 
room placed right side up on a piece of paper under 
an inverted glass will print with its spores a pic- 
ture of the radiating leaves or gills beneath. A 
slight blow on a puffball in the pasture will cause 
a puff of smoke-like dust to rise from it—really millions of spores 
that have ripened inside the puffball and are now ready to grow 
into new puffball plants when they fall on favourable soil. 
Puffball 
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