FUNGI. 351 



appear, each packed with transparent oval nucleated spores, just 

 such, spores and quite such sacs as appeared in the fruiting sur- 

 face of the morel, and we are ready with the botanist to call the 

 granules fruit. Who could have guessed the contents of that 

 sphere ? But look again at those radiating ornamental filaments. 

 Trace to its distal end a single ray, and see the grapnels by which 

 the fertile globule we have studied holds fast to the surface of its 

 host through storm and flood. Notice the elegant curves, the 

 symmetrical branching, fit model for the artist in arabesque or 

 filigree ! What more beautiful or more efficiently suggestive ! 

 (Fig. 2 a.) 



Such is the lilac blight ; but now that we have discoverd one 

 such fungus, we may carry our inquiries to almost any extent. 

 The neighboring cherry-tree will afford similar material for study 

 and admiration. Here the appendages are simpler, and the fruit 

 itself contains but a single sac with spores (Fig. 3 a). The pop- 

 lars and the willows show spherules whose appendages are simple 

 hooks, so that the fruit is a minute bur of the teazel sort, fit 

 for fairy carding (Fig. 2 &). The oak-leaf and the hazel bear ap- 

 pendages simpler still, the appendages being straight and needle- 

 shaped, ray -like, actinic ; Phyllactinia LeVeiHe* named it — leaf- 

 ray — the needles starting like rays of light from some effulgent 

 center (Fig. 3 &). 



During the early days of autumn we can hardly go amiss for 

 the appendaged fungi such as just described. In the woodland, 

 the pastures, by the road-side, in shade and in sun, a thousand 

 white-flecked leaves attract the appreciative and only the appre- 

 ciative eye. Minuteness removes from ordinary ken — and the 

 world goes on ! Besides, these parasites are not especially harm- 

 ful, at least in the phases described, to their presumably unwilling 

 hosts. The pea- vine and the rose-bush may sometimes suffer, but 

 generally the leaves attacked have pretty well done the season's 

 work before the parasite attains its maximum, so that man's 

 interest in the matter is not specially affected. There is, how- 

 ever, another and different set of leaf -fungi whose parasitism is 

 decidedly more intimate, and consequently destructive of the 

 host-plant, suicidal as such a policy would seem to be. These 

 latter, as indeed all the fungi already cited, are known as blights, 

 and as such some species are already famous. The potato mur- 

 rain, which has its place in civil history, is a very pretty little 

 transparent branching fungus, so delicate that a breath destroys 

 it. First becoming notorious in 1845, and during the famines of 

 1846 and 1847, it has been found and studied in all parts of the 

 world for the forty years succeeding. The lilac fungus is content 

 to spread its mycelium over the surface of the lilac-leaves, absorb- 

 ing its nourishment from the surface cells ; but the potato mold, 



