THE steadily growing interest of our countrymen in Natural History has called out various elementary works on the different branches, but none SO philosophical, or so exhaustive, as those upon Botany. With a reasonable amount of preliminary knowledge, and armed with one of Gray's or Wood's text books, there are very few of our native flowering plants, or cryptogams of the higher orders, which he will not find mapped down too plainly to be long mistaken. No other branch of Natural History has text books so plenty, so excellent, or so cheap; yet the lower orders are wholly without any note or comment accessible to the common student. The botanical works mentioned scarcely name their grand divisions; and though our coasts are fringed with sea weed, and our mountains clothed with lichens, and the fungi grow everywhere, there are only rare and expensive works to help the student comprehend them. Tuckerman's "Lichens" is out of print; the Smithsonian "Alga" is practically unget-at-able; while the only published work devoted to the American fungi is the large and costly one of Schweinnitz, which exists only in the German language. There are probably not twenty copies in America. This is the more to be regrettel as the United States, next to Sweden, are the most prolific in fungi of any part of the known world.

The cause of this paucity of elementary works is manifold, but the chief reason lies in the extreme obscurity and difficulty which involve the subject, when examined in scientific detail. It is one of the most abstruse of sciences. More than half the species are microscopic, or nearly so. Many of them are extremely fugacious, and others so delicate as not to bear a touch. Some whole families are entirely subterranean,

and only discovered by accident. Very many grow only on decaying substances, which are neither easy nor agreeable to examine. The fructification, on which the classification of all plants is primarily based, is wholly microscopic.

Notwithstanding all these drawbacks, much may be learned without a glass; for no one knows, till he has tried, how much power there is in the unaided eye. In the commencement of this study, it may be better to avoid having recourse to the microscope; for the more conspicuous fungi, and their more easily discerned characteristics, challenge the memory to retain the discoveries of a single walk. Until the visible becomes familiar, it is as well to take the word of botanists who have examined, concerning the invisible. It is not essential to see every thing in order to know it. You do not always dissect a man to find him out. You believe in his bones without seeing them.

Fries, the great "Father of Micology," used only his eyes, and found them sufficient; and though Berkeley thinks he got at the facts by "tact" rather than by actual sight, he got at them.

If you begin to explore this field and fail, at first, to see the wonders of which we read, remember, "The eye sees only what it brings with it the power to see," and be not discouraged. Keep looking, and by-and-by you will see. Sooner or later we find what we look for in this world. But the eye must be educated. In a Teachers' Institute Agassiz found very few eyes well enough trained to see insect organs, ten times the size of those plainly visible to his own. In teaching Botany, I have found a class supplied with pocket lenses, less able to distinguish minute floral organs, than my own unassisted eyes. In neither case had the natural quality of the eyes

much to do with their capacity. The mind must have some notion of what it is looking for, or it will not know it when it does see it. Seeing, you may not perceive.

The first of my explorations were made without guide or guide-book. I had never seen a micologist, or a work on the subject. I collected and described one hundred and fifty species within the radius of half a mile, lettering and numbering them, by way of distinction, having only the one name "Agaricus" among the lot. At the commencement, I had no idea what to look for, except to see all there was, if it were possible. After a great deal of looking, I began to perceive a number of things I had not before observed, although their pictures must have been on the retina many scores of times. And two years afterward, when I first met with a work on the subject, I recognized with surprise, in the scientific descriptions, characteristics which had escaped my observation at the time I saw the plants. I had then written down every thing I observed, but on comparing that description with the printed one, memory instantly endorsed the full particulars of the latter. I do not know how I remembered those minutiæ for years, without knowing them, nor in what hidden chamber of the brain they had lain latent so long. I only know the fact. How many pictures we may have thus photographed from the retina, stored away in that secret treasure chamber of the memory, to be brought forth in the future, who can tell? But it is worth while, at least, to be thoroughly good lookers. That is the Through Express to Wonderland. You travel there on your five senses; chiefly on three of them. You may go all around the world by steam, and not find it; but if you know how to look into a plate of stale apple sauce, you are there.

The mould you find there is a plant, and the drops of amber or jet which cap the slender threads, are the 19 spores which form some of the myriad dust

particles, visible in any sunbeam, let into the cleanest room. All spores are extremely small, and most of them can penetrate wherever air or water can go. Those of parasitic fungi, like "rust," and leaf “mildew," even sometimes circulate in the sap of the affected plant. They are very hard to kill, bearing extremes of heat and cold without inconvenience; retaining their vitality for years under very unpromising circumstances. They are the simplest known form of organic existence; being simple cells, without organs. The seeds of higher organisms have distinguishable parts-the cotyledons and the germ, or growing point. Spores have neither. Their mode of vegetating is extremely obscure. In the algo it has been watched, and found to be merely a multiplication of cells similar to the first. But different orders do not germinate in the same way, and little is yet known of the method of the fungi, which grow mostly at night, and in some substance less transparent than water.

Its capacity for growth is all that renders a spore more organic than a crystal. But that is every thing. It contains within itself the inscrutable, grand mystery of life. This little cell, like any other vital cell, or seed, or egg, has in itself, hidden beyond all finding, that fixed law of development which makes each of these primitive beginnings grow "after its kind." No hint, or prophecy of the form of the future plant can be found in the spore. Yet the organic life-type within, invariably produces a descendant, identical in species and general quality with the ancestor. This formative principle is everywhere operating, intensely active, invariable, constant, potent, but intangible and invisible as thought. It mocks at the power of lens or dissection, as at the gross bungling of the most delicate chemicals, to find the principle of LIFE.

Let a chemist try to extract an epos from the brains of a dead poet!

Because it cannot be strained out, and bottled up-because it eludes all teststhere are those who deny this formative

force as an entity. But they cannot use the commonest speech, nor recognize the difference between the living and the not alive, without measurably recognizing the perpetual miracle of the Incarnation; which makes any living thing allied to the Infinite, and worth more in itself, for the sake of the wonder of its being alive, than any inanimate things can be.

Whether definitely aware of it or not, naturalists are constantly exploring as nearly as possible to the origin of life. They not only use the reproductive system of plants, as the basis of classification, but the lower down they go in the vegetable scale, and the more obscure the generative processes become, the more wholly have they based their classification upon them. Probably because other marks become still more obscure, but also because in this region lies the chief difference between organic and inorganic things.

Formerly some contended that fungi were mere chemical freaks of nature, spontaneously produced by the fermentation of the decaying substances on which they were found; but the demonstration of their vegetable reproductive system ended that debate, as well as the claims of those who believed they had a semi-animal character.

They are anomalous plants, inhaling oxygen, and exhaling carbonic acid, as animals do. The substance of all edible fungi resembles animal rather than vegetable food, both in taste and smell; and many species decay with a putrescence strikingly fleshlike in odor, and are devoured by maggots as soon as they begin to decay, and often sooner.

Another anomaly is found in their want of individuality; many spores often uniting to produce a single plant. We would scout the idea of a dozen eggs hatching into one chicken, or a peck of acorns sprouting into one oak; yet one Clavaria will grow from a brood of spores, and Berkeley says that "No one can be a diligent observer of the fungi in all their phases, without being convinced of the fact."

that they have had another name given them by way of distinction. The spores seem to vegetate first into these roots or "mycelia," which penetrate and permeate the substance of whatever they take hold of, with a complete network of threads, long before they put up any top. Sometimes this mycelium is the only part of the plant popularly known, as in the case of "punk," or "spunk," well known as a native tinder to backwoodsmen, but which is the root of an obscure fungus, which often consists in nothing but this mycelium. The mycelium of the common edible mushroom (known to gardeners as "spawn "), after permeating the matrix prepared for it, can be taken up with this matrix and dried into a sort of brick, which will retain its vitality for years, and when the proper conditions are offered will go on spreading in the soil indefinitely, and put up two or three crops of mushrooms. And Berkeley adds: "Many fungi arise from the confluence of mycelium germinating from many spores, and this union, by means of anastomosis, is as intimate as if the threads of the mycelium were derived from a single spore. And such union is not the same as that which takes place in grafting among the Phænogams."

The cryptogamia have been called distinctly "cellulares; " but this is hardly just, since the ferns and other higher orders have traces of vascular tissue, but the fungi are wholly cellular. The cells differ, however, in different plants, and in different parts of the same individual. In the common mushroom this is plainly discernible. Cut one vertically through cap and stem, and you will find first a skin over the top, like white kid; next the substance of the cap, like soft pith; then the brittle rosy gills which bear the spores; then the white threads of the stem; and if you go to the root, you will find that different still.

The substance producing the spores is called hymenium. In the Agaricini, or "Toad-stool" family it occupies the

have any mycelium, and must live on air and moisture only.

Some grow with extreme rapidity, vegetating and decaying in a few hours, while some species of polyporus are perennial, growing layer upon layer of vertical tubes or pores, like the growth of annual layers of wood in exogenous

trees.

They are all destitute of chlorophyl, and the few that are green are of a dull metallic hue, quite unlike the verdure of other plants. This fact, and that of their inhalation of oxygen are supposed to have some intimate chemical connection, and forms one of the chief distinctions between the great divisions of Fungi and Lichens.

Fries, and all mycologists after him, divided the fungi into two unequal grand divisions. The principal one (Sporidiifera) bearing the spores naked; and the minor branch (Sporiferi) bearing them in sacs or asci. These distinctions are, of course, microscopic; but anybody can tell a toadstool from a peziza. The general umbrella shape and gills beneath characterize the Agarics; while the open, and often brilliant

ly colored cups distinguish the peziza. Many other families may be as readily distinguished by a mere general description. Some English works containing copious descriptions, and a few plates, make it easy to identify the larger species. An American work of the kind would necessarily be larger, to cover our larger territory and extra species, but need not be more obscure or less

accurate.

I hardly need add that a preliminary knowledge of the higher walks of Botany is absolutely essential to entering upon the study of the cryptogamia.

I have dwelt but slightly on the really considerable economic value of such knowledge, as our people are as yet hardly willing to test the dietetic excellence of such novel food; and, moreover, the chief value of any knowledge does not lie in the domain of the economist or the cook. That a fact exists in nature is sufficient reason for finding out its details.

If the present article prove of sufficient interest to warrant it, I may hereafter offer something further for those interested in these delightful pursuits.