348 FLOWERLESS PLANTS, 
That these fungi are sometimes purely meteoric, is proven 
by their fastening upon iron and rapidly extending them- 
selves; here the matter is manifestly conveyed to them by 
the air and moisture. Many Polypori, too, grow on hard 
tufa of volcanoes without a particle of organic matter. 
Nevertheless, unhealthy conditions of air, soils, and the ob- 
ject attacked, we have often seen to be true concomitants, so 
that in most cases they may be deemed consequences, rather 
than causes, if one prefers that view of the subject—our 
chief concern being a review of the facts. Some of them, 
indeed, require certain specific conditions so well known 
that they can be grown to order, leading shrewd observers 
to the plausible conjecture that they are of spontaneous 
generation. — . 
Berkley and McMillan, from whom we collate, mention 
that in Italy a kind of Polyporus, greatly relished, is grown 
simply by singeing the stump or stems of hazel-nut trees and 
placing them in a moist, dark cellar; other instances of ex- 
tinet fires being followed by fungoid scavengers, imps of 
the pit, are too well known. Now, as charcoal and other 
ack bodies absorb many hundred times their own bulk of 
foetid gases — for the color, black, is philosophically and dev- 
ilishly filthy, and it ardently desires or affiliates with, and 
pertinaciously clings to foul air and odors; and, as a very 
fiend, only yields them up readily as contagion, eluding, 
perchance, the. alchemist's wand — the vile spell is hardly 
broken but by that great power of the universe, heat. Hence 
we see why they make such apt servants and meteoric media 
for their masters, the Fungi. These plants and other para- 
sites sometimes invade living organisms, both animal and 
vegetable, in their most vigorous state, but we may safely 
say, in general terms, that whatever fouls or lowers the 
standard of life in the human, in the animal, or in the plant, 
surely invites these disorder-inspecting gnomes from beneath ; 
which move to and fro in the earth— messengers of the 
shades !— ready to alight upon and claim as their own all such 
trenchers upon the outer realms of death. It is therefore 
