Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/150

138 deeper on the under surface. When raw, it has the pungent taste of pepper. Spores, of a pallid, ochre-color. It may be found from June to October.

Fairy-ring Champignon (Marasmius oreades). This delicious fungus (Fig. 10) grows in pastures in rings, or parts of rings, and may be known by the following characters: Cap smooth, fleshy, convex, rather blunt at apex, more or less compressed, tough, leathery, elastic, wrinkled; when water-soaked, brown; when dry, buff, or cream-color, the apex often remaining red-brown, as if scorched; gills free from the stem, distant, swelling out in the middle, the same color as the cap, but paler; stem equal, solid, twisted, very tough and fibrous, of a pale, silky-white color. This genus is much addicted, to dead leaves.—



Another very acrid species (A. urens) has a similar appearance, but the gills are narrow and much crowded.

While all fungi are cellular in structure, they yet present a great variety of consistence. Some assume a corky or leathery firmness, while the substance of others is a mere watery pulp or gelatinous scum. Some are interlacing fibres, spread like a veil over decaying matters, while others are hard and tough like wood. They vary equally in taste and form. The cultivation of fungi for esculent purposes is confined to a single species, A. campestris, although, according to Cooke, there is no reason why others, for instance, Marasmius oreades, and the morel (see plate), should not succeed equally well. An unaccountable circumstance in this culture is the impossibility of growing mushrooms from spores. It is the mycelium or spawn which is always planted by gardeners, from which the production of mushrooms is simple enough, but how to obtain mycelium from spores is still a mystery. Other species present a similar difficulty, as the following statement from "Fungi and their Uses" will illustrate: