302 United States Species of Lycoperdon. 



Albany, Sandlake, Gansevoort, Brewerton, Catskill 

 Mountains and Helderberg Mountains. It appears to be 

 one ot our most polymorphous puff-balls. It is so variable 

 that I have been obliged to modify the usual description 

 very much in order to include forms which are quite 

 diverse from each other yet which appear to run together 

 in such a way that I am unable to draw any satisfactory 

 line of distinction between them. The following is the 

 usual description given in the Manuals. 



" Peridium flaccid, dingy-rufous, opening by a minute 

 obtuse mouth, bark at first rough with minute spines ; 

 sterile base cellular, continuous with the capillitium ; 

 spores largish, pedicellate, brown-purple, echinulate." 



I do not find the spores in our plant truly pedicellate, 

 but in all the forms which I have referred to this species, 

 and in European specimens of it, as well as in all the 

 species of this subsection, I find them intermingled with 

 short, fragmentary, slender filaments which look very much 

 as if they were pedicels broken from the spores. The 

 spores do not appear to be attached terminally to them 

 but in some instances they appear as if laterally attached. 

 A minute point or apicidus, probably the point of at- 

 tachment, is visible on the spores, but this is scarcely 

 worthy of being called a pedicel. Neither do the Ame- 

 rican specimens exhibit a dingy-rufous color, but so variable 

 is the plant that a rigid agreement with the description is 

 scarcely to be expected. 



Our specimens group themselves in three principal 

 forms or varieties. The first is usually one or two inches 

 broad, sessile or with a very short stem, nearly smooth, 

 being mealy or pruinose and having a few minute, weak, 

 scattered spinules. Its color is generally whitish or white 

 slightly clouded with brown. It grows in sandy pastures 

 and cleared land and is apparently the nearest of the three 

 in its resemblance to the type. 



