367 
THE PRINCIPLES OE BOTANY. 
By Professor James Buckman, F.L.S., F.G.S., &c. 
[Continued from _p. 294.) 
There are few people so incurious as not to have had their 
attention arrested by the peculiar green and brown circles in 
meadows to which the name Fairy Rings has been given — 
the name itself, indeed, suggesting a degree of popular mys- 
tery and superstition connected with them. 
As these rings, then, are so frequently the abodes of dif- 
ferent species of fungi, our history of this family of plants 
would be incomplete without an attempt to unravel some of 
the mysteries which the rings encircle; we purpose, then, in 
this article, to review the subject of the origin and formation 
of fairy rings. 
Now] that the new grass of the meadow is beginning its 
spring growth, we are made aware of the presence of more or 
less perfectly formed circles, sometimes occupying the undu- 
lating slopes of the hill pasture, at others here and there 
dotting the richer lowlands. These vary in size from a few 
inches to many feet in diameter ; often the circles are most 
complete and regularly formed, but very many of them are 
only arcuate, while others appear as though they had been 
formed of two anastomosing circles, which, by their union, 
make a double bow. 
If we examine them carefully at this time, we find that 
they are composed of two circles, one within the other, or, 
rather, each is composed of two bands, an outer one of more 
or less brown herbage and bare soil, and an inner one of 
fresh green grass, growing much more luxuriantly than the 
grass of the rest of the meadow. 
In one of our own meadows we only this day examined 
perfect or imperfect circles to the number of fifty in a space 
of five acres ; of these the smallest was three feet and the 
largest twenty-four feet in diameter. 
Many of these circles consist of a green ring only, but in 
an orchard at the bottom of this meadow are two most per- 
fectly-formed circles, one of fifteen, the other of twenty-four 
feet in diameter, in which the brown outer band is very con- 
spicuous ; and on yesterday digging up some of the soil, we 
found it impregnated with the mycelium , or spawn of a fun- 
gus, emitting an agreeable fungoid odour ; and next month 
we shall hope to gather a good harvest of the “ May mush^ 
