42 G 
THE ESCULENT FUNGUSES OF ENGLAND. 
some instances, are, perhaps, nowhere more 
strikingly exemplified than amidst the ruins of 
its own creation. Coeval with many old brick 
fabrics of earlier times, perhaps imbedded in 
the very mortar w T hich holds them together, 
it may lurk there for centuries in quiescence, 
till once arousing its energies, it continues to 
exert them in ceaseless activity ever after. 
It has at Koine planted its pink Valerians on 
her highest towers, and its wild fig-tree in the 
breaches of her walls ; nor are the granite 
obelisks of her piazzas, nor the classic groups 
in marble on her Quirinal mount, entirely 
exempt from its encroachments ; a conspiracy 
of plants, one hundred strong, have long ago 
planned the destruction of the Colosseum ; 
their undermining process advances each year, 
and neither iron nor new brick-work can arrest 
it long ; that old Roman cement, which the 
Barbarians gave up as impracticable, and the 
pick-axe of the Barberini had but begun to 
disintegrate, will, ere the lapse of another 
century, be effectually pulled to pieces by the 
rending arm of vegetation. Here, as erst in 
Juvenal's time, the Malaficus finds no walls 
too strong to rive asunder ; no tower beyond 
the reach of its scaling ; no monument too 
sacred for it to touch. In the class of plants 
immediately under consideration, while the 
expansive effort of growth is equal to what it 
is in other cases, its effects are far more 
startling from their suddenness. Mons. 
Bulliard (to cite one or two instances out of a 
great many) relates, that on placing a Phallus 
impudicus within a glass vessel, the plant ex- 
panded so rapidly, as to shiver its sides with 
an explosive detonation, as loud as that of a 
pistol. Dr. Carpenter, in his Elements of 
Physiology, mentions that, ' in the neigh- 
bourhood of Basingstoke, a paving-stone, 
measuring twenty-one inches square, and 
weighing eighty-three pounds, was completely 
raised an inch and a half out of its bed, by a 
mass of toadstools, of from six to seven inches 
in diameter, and that nearly the whole pave- 
ment of the town suffered displacement from 
the same cause.' A friend has seen a crop of 
puff-balls raise large flag-stones considerably 
above the plane of their original level ; and I 
have myself recently witnessed an extensive 
displacement of the pegs of a wooden pave- 
ment, which had been driven nine inches into 
the ground, but were heaved up irregularly, 
in several places, by small bouquets of Agarics, 
growing from below. 
" Most funguses do not present great ano- 
malies in their size, but retain nearly the same 
dimensions throughout the whole course of 
their being ; some few species, however, seem 
to have a faculty of almost indefinite expan- 
sion. The usual size of a puff-ball, as we all 
know, is not much larger than an egg, but 
some puff-balls attain to the dimensions of the 
human head, or exceed it. Mr. Berkeley 
quotes the case of a Polyporus squamosus, 
which in three weeks grew to seven feet five 
inches in periphery, and weighed thirty-four 
pounds ; also of a Polyporus fraxineus, 
which in a few years measured forty-two 
inches across. Clusius tells us of a fungus in 
Pannonia, of such immense size, that after 
satisfying the cravings of a large mycophilous 
household, enough of it remained to fill a 
chariot ; this must have been the Polyporus 
frondosus, to which Polyporus John Bapt. 
Porta also alludes, as that called gallinace,* 
by the Neapolitans, which is so big, he says, 
that you can scarcely make your hands meet 
round it ; he had known it attain twelve 
pounds weight in a few days.f Bolton, in 
1787, found an Agaricus muscarius, which, 
' after the removal of a considerable portion 
of its stalk, weighed nearly two pounds ;' 
Withering, an Agaricus Georgii, ' which 
weighed fourteen pounds,' and Mr. Stackhouse 
another of the same species in Cornwall, 
' which was eighteen inches across, and had a 
stem as thick as a man's wrist ;' and I lately 
picked in the park at Buckhurst, a Boletus 
edulis, which measured twenty-eight inches 
round its pileus, and eight round the stem, 
and a few days later a Boletus pachypus, the 
girth of which was thirty-two inches." — Pp. 
12—14, 16, 17. 
We cannot forbear quoting a forcible pas- 
sage relating to the now almost universally 
exploded — and perhaps we might add, impi- 
ous — doctrine of spontaneous, or, as it is 
sometimes modified, equivocal generation, in 
the maintenance of which doctrine, the fungi 
have often been called in requisition : — 
" It would be an insult to the reader's un- 
derstanding, and a most idle waste of his time, 
to attempt to confute such self-destroying 
dogmas as those of ' spontaneous,' or of 
'equivocal generation,' which last is only a 
clumsy equivoque expressive of the same 
thing ; we might just as well talk of the pen- 
dulum of a clock generating the time and 
space in which it librated, as of dead matter 
spontaneously quickening and actuating those 
new movements of which some of its particles 
have become the seat ; for how, in the name 
of common sense, can that which we assume 
* "By this word, however, the vulgar generally 
understood the Cantharcllus cibarius." 
f "This species, which is somewhat rare in England, 
occurred in abundance this year in the neighbourhood 
of Tonbridge Wells. I found four specimens of it on 
the oak roots in the Grove, one of which rose nearly 
a foot from the ground, measured considerably more 
than two and a half feet across, and weighed from 
eighteen to twenty pounds ; the other specimens were 
of much smaller dimensions." 
