FUNGI. 



191 



Fig. 2.— Section of the 

 Lamellae op common 

 Mushroom. 



or stem, crowned with a cap, the pileus. This cap consists of an 

 expanded disk, bearing on its lower surface hundreds of radiat- 

 ing plates, the gills or lamella?., with sharp edges and delicately 



tinted, velvety sides. Cut a section perpendic- 

 ular to the course of these plates or gills, and 

 we have a comb-like structure which under a 

 good lens presents the appearance portrayed in 

 Fig. 2. Under still better lenses we may discover 

 on each gill-section a marginal row of rather 

 large cylindric cells, each bearing at its sum- 

 mit a pair of smaller cells manifestly formed 

 by abstriction from diverging branches of the 

 larger cell (see Fig. 3). The small cells are the 

 spores, and the supporting cell but the termi- 

 nus of an extended and much-branched hypha, 

 which has blended with a myriad like itself to 

 form stalk and cap and gill of our completed 

 mushroom. That is the whole structure, and 

 yet from such simple machinery behold what wealth and variety 

 of form and style come forth ! Other modes of spore-production 

 there are to be hereafter seen, but that described is characteristic 

 of the vast majority of those 

 greater fungi which occupy 

 the shadows of our world. To 

 begin with, there are hun- 

 dreds of species of agarics, 

 fungi like the mushroom, 

 differing from each other in 

 matters of form and color 

 chiefly, the attachment of 

 stipe and gills, the stability 

 and instability of the entire 

 structure. Some, as the " ink- 

 caps" (Coprinus), spring in 

 the night and vanish in inky 

 dissolution ere the sun as- 

 cends to midday ; others, as 

 the little woolly fungus with 

 cleft gills {Schizophyllum), 

 so common on fallen branch- 

 es everywhere, survive the 

 storms of many seasons and outlast the substratum on which they 

 grow. Fig. 3 shows the elegant curvature of the cleft gill-plates, 

 and the order in which they appear. New ones are constantly 

 intercalated between those already formed. 



In all these the lamellae run out in rays and remain quite gen- 



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Fio. 3. — Schizophtllum commune, cross-section. 



