THALIOGENS. 957 
When the vast numbers and universal dissemination of 
Fungales are taken into consideration, together with their diversity 
of form and size, it is not surprising that botanists have been much 
puzzled over them. Fries discovered no fewer than two thousand 
species within the compass of a square furlong in Sweden. Of 
the Agarics alone above a thousand species are described. In size 
they range from the minute moulds which are found to produce 
death in the silkworm and the common house-fly (which M. 
Deslongchamps found in the air-cells of the Eider duck, while 
alive, and which Professor Owen found in the lungs of a flamingo) 
up to the Great Puff-ball, which attains the diameter of a foot in a 
single night. 
The different structures of Fungales.have been equally puzzling. 
Some writers have questioned the propriety of classing them as 
plants at all; and it has been proposed to establish them as an 
independent kingdom, equally distinct from plants and animals. 
Others have adopted the unphilosophical notion that they are 
mere fortuitous developments of vegetable matter, called into action 
by special conditions of light, heat, and air. But the fact that 
the cultivated species can be propagated with certainty, is no 
doubt applicable to the whole. It is argued with more reason 
that many of the Fungales which have been ascribed to equivocal 
generation, are the effects of diseased cuticle, or of the underlying 
tissues on which the sporules have settled. Fries thus argues 
against these notions. “The sporules,” he says, “are infinite, 
for in a single individual of Reticularie maxima I have reckoned 
10,000,000, so subtle as to resemble thin smoke, as light as if 
raised by evaporation and dispersed in so many ways—by the 
sun’s attraction, by insects, by adhesion and elasticity —that 
it is difficult to conceive the spots from which they could be 
excluded.” 
The Cartes or Fungales which attack the wheat-plant and others 
of the Graminacese are, according to Queckett, Mucedines, to which 
he proposes giving the name of Ergotetia abortans. It belongs 
to the Concomycetes of Fries. This author considered it a diseased 
State of the plant itself, and placed it in his doubtful genus 
Spermoedia. From the investigations of Queckett it appears that 
© gteat mass of the Ergot, as it has been called, consists of the 
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