134 
MUSHROOMS, HOW TO GROW THEM. 
tion, have "kept the pieces of each brick close together, 
and where flock has appeared I have failed to find that 
the other pieces of spawn from that brick are more 
liable to produce flock-infested mushrooms than are the 
.pieces of the bricks that, as yet, have not shown any 
sign of diseased produce. 
How general is this disease ? In a bed say three feet 
wide by thirty feet long and of two months’ bearing one 
may get as few as five or as many as fifty flocky mush¬ 
rooms ; one or two may occur to-day, and we may not 
find another for a week or two, when we may get a 
whole clump of them, and so on. It is not the large 
number of them that makes them dangerous, for they 
never appear in quantity. They sometimes appear 
among the earliest mushrooms in the bed, but generally 
not until after the bed has been in bearing condition for 
a week or two. 
What conditions are most favorable or unfavorable to 
the growth of this disease I do not know; but it is cer¬ 
tainly not caused by debility in the mushroom itself, as 
the parasite attacks healthy, robust mushrooms and debil¬ 
itated ones indiscriminately. This flocky condition is 
caused by one or more saprophytic and parasitic fungi of 
lowly origin, whose various parts are reduced to mere 
threads, simple or branched, and divided into tubular cells 
at intervals, or else they are long, continuous microscopic 
tubes without any partitions, except at those occasional 
points where a branch, destined to produce spores, is 
given off. Generally two or more species of these thread- 
fungi are present at the same time on the mushroom 
host, and by the multiplied crossing and interweaving of 
their threads and branches produce, through their great 
numbers, the whitish, felted mass of “ flock”; while as 
individuals the threads are so minute as to be scarcely 
or not at all visible to the naked eye. Similar thread- 
fungi may often be found in the woods among damp 
