THE ESCULENT FUNGUSES OF ENGLAND. 
427 
to be dead, i. e. emphatically and totally 
without life, convey such purely vital pheno- 
mena as those of intus-susception and growth, 
which by the very supposition, are no longer 
within itself. Life, on such an hypothesis as 
this, ceases to be the opposite and antagonist 
principle to death, of which it then becomes 
but a different mode and a new phasis. It is 
not the incomprehensibility of such a notion 
(be it well understood) against which the ob- 
jection lies, for, as life begins and ends in 
mystery, that would be no objection ; it lies 
in the rashness of attempting to solve an 
admitted mystery, by placing a palpable ab- 
surdity in its room ; vainly and irreverently 
arrogating to itself the honours of a discovery, 
which we are to believe if we can ! At this 
rate, addled eggs, abandoned by the vital 
principle, might take to hatching themselves ! 
A more legitimate, and very interesting sub- 
ject for inquiry is, whether those funguses 
which are parasitical, (i. e. derive their sup- 
port from the structures whence they ema- 
nate,) are so many separate constituents of a 
superior life under analysis; or each, of itself, 
a new individual ? In support of the first 
view it is urged, that since reproduction in 
such lower existences is nothing but a modi- 
fication of nutrition, a new process might well 
originate from its perversion, and thus give 
rise to new products ; and just as the change 
in the ordinary nutrition of our bodily organs 
is prone to give birth to various local disor- 
ganizations, or morbid growths ; such, it 
is argued, might be the origin of fungoid 
growths on trees. But then comes the diffi- 
culty: such a view does not, and plainly 
cannot, explain the development of the not 
parasitical kinds, of which the origin should 
be the same ; no, nor even of all that live by 
suction at the expense of other plants, since 
there are as many kinds which quicken in dead 
and decaying structures, as there are that 
issue out of decrepit and living ones ; here 
then it is plain that perverted nutrition can 
have nothing to do with their production, for 
in this case nutrition has, by the supposition, 
ceased; and to talk of disease after death 
would be a strange figure of speech indeed ! 
An elm or oak is frequently dead five, seldom 
less than three, years before these parasitical 
growths make their appearance ; from which 
it would appear to follow that seeds are not 
developed by, but that they must be extrane 
ous to, and independent of, any pathological 
relation of the plant from which they grow. 
If then, fungus life be not to be sought for, 
and cannot with propriety be said to originate 
in any morbid conditions of the tissues from 
which they spring, whence do they derive 
life ? in other words, whence in every instance 
comes that particular seed which, when quick- 
ened, is to produce after its kind ? Lies this 
dormant for a season in those dead and decay- 
ing tissues, which a little later the plant 
originating from it is destined to embellish ? 
or is the living germ first brought to them by 
the winds, and merely deposited on their sur- 
face, as in a fitting nidus on which their future 
development is to be effected ? Some writers 
take one view, some another. Many believe 
the seeds of funguses to come directly from 
the earth, and to be drawn up with the sap, 
which as it penetrates throughout the tissues 
of the plant, must carry the seeds also along 
with it ; that such is actually sometimes the 
case is certain, since we can not only plant 
parasitical blights of a particular kind, so as 
to infect particular plants, but may also, by 
digging a trench between those that have 
already become diseased, and those that are 
still healthy, stay the progress of the blight ; 
thus clearly establishing, not only the fact of 
seeds, but also the highly interesting addi- 
tional one, of their ascent into the structures 
of plants by intus-susception ; and to arrive 
at a general view from these particular cases, 
this would seem to be the usual mode of their 
propagation ; neither does it make against this 
view, nor is it more in favour of the other, 
which supposes the germs to be derived pri- 
marily from the air, and to be thence precipi- 
tated on the structures where they grow, that 
funguses are found on organizations in decay, 
on withered boughs, and on seared leaves, out 
of which all sap must of course have been 
long ago exsiccated ; for what then ? though 
the sap does, the seeds do not evaporate with 
it ; these, once absorbed and diffused during 
the life-time of the plant throughout its whole 
economy, remain there, in a state of potential 
activity, ready to burst forth and germinate 
whenever the necessary conditions for these 
wonderful changes shall be presented to them, 
just as though the seeds of corn now flourish- 
ing in different parts of England, had first 
existed for some thousand years as mummy 
wheat, potentially and unquickened. Nothing 
perishes in nature : destructio unius matrix 
alterius : life may change titles, but never 
becomes extinct ; so soon as the more perfect 
plant dies, a host of other vegetable existences, 
hitherto enthralled by laws of an organization 
superior to their own, now that the connexion 
has been dissevered, put forth their separate 
energies, and severally assert their indepen- 
dence ; the poplar may have perished — root, 
stem, and branch, but its extinction is only 
the signal for other existences, which had 
been heretofore bound up and hid within its 
own, to assert themselves ; and accordingly a 
JPolyporus sprouts out here ; there a Thele- 
plwra embellishes the dead bark ; and here 
an Agaric springs out of the decaying fibres 
