NOTES ON FUNGI. 
I29 
filaments, and in this manner matting the ground: Presently 
several of these tubular filaments will coalesce, and a little rounded 
protuberance appear. This is the embryonic fungus, which, 
continuing to grow, will in perhaps a few hours be some six 
inches in height. A story is told of a fungus two inches in 
height, which had sprung up, to the certain knowledge of the 
recorder in one night! The great red cap of the Fly Agaric, so 
abundant in our Suffolk Woods, the tiny waifer-like stem and 
spicules of the club bearing fungi, and the great broad pileus of 
Polyporus squamosus, almost invariably found high up on the trunk 
of some tree of considerable growth, are probably the most 
noticeable and striking. 
Toadstools, appearing to rise from dead leaves and coming 
chiefly, as they do, at a time of year when all other vegetation is 
on the decline, carry out, maybe, better than any other group in 
the natural scale, the truth of that line, dear to every naturalist 
and lover of nature :— 
“Life springs up from life’s decay.” 
and this life of the fungi is not, as one might suppose, an entirely 
selfish and egostical one from its isolation, both as regards season 
and situation—excepting, of course, the case ol our own edible 
mushroom, which by the way is the only fungus looked upon with 
suspicion by the Italian fruiterers. If any of the Agarics be 
rooted up and shaken over an inverted open umbrella, hundreds 
of tiny beetles will fall out and, if many fungi be shaken, probably 
there will be a thousand little creeping Brachelytra all in the um¬ 
brella at the same time. All these wee parasites live, eat, lay their 
eggs, and die upon, and among, the gills of the plant, and were 
there no fungi, science would in all probability lose hundreds of 
species of Coleoptera , which would have no natural food on which 
to subsist. 
It is a remarkably curious fact that these singular plants absorb 
oxygen and respire carbonic acid gas. In the case of ordinary 
flowering plants the order is reversed : a geranium will inhale 
carbolic acid gas from the atmosphere (often hydrogenic also!) 
and give off oxygen. In connection with this, botanists think 
that the scarcity in fungi of green colouring matter, so constant 
in flowering plants, and the botanic world in general, is due to 
this reversal of transpired gases. Botanists are, however, 
unanimous that, in flowering plants, light is absolutely necessary, 
not only for the growth and healthy condition of the plant, but 
also for the existence of the green chlorophyl, or colouring 
matter. On the other hand light does not appear to ameliorate 
the growth of fungi, which often choose a dark cellar, hollow 
tree, or cavity in a flagstone in which to flourish ; some species 
of the Hypogaria live even below the surfce of the earth and 
never under any natural conditions whatever catch a ray of sunlight. 
