A treatise on the esculent funguses of England / containing an account of their classical history, uses, characters, development, structure, nutritious properties, modes of cooking and preserving, etc.

by David Badham

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF FUNGUSES.

“Ins Innre der Natur dringt kein erschaffner Geist,

Zu glücklich wem sie nur die äussre Schale lösst.”—Haller.

It would be an insult to the reader’s understanding, and a most idle waste of his time, to attempt to confute such self-destroying dogmas as those of “spontaneous” or of “equivocal” generation, which last is only a clumsy équivoque expressive of the same thing: we might just as well talk of the pendulum of a clock generating the time and space in which it librated, as of dead matter spontaneously quickening and actuating those new movements of which some of its particles have become the seat; for how, in the name of common sense, can that which we assume to be dead, i. e. emphatically and totally without life, convey such purely vital phenomena as those of intus-susception and growth, which by the very supposition are no longer within itself? Life, on such an hypothesis as this, ceases to be the opposite and antagonist principle to death, of which it then becomes but a different mode and a new phasis. It is not the incomprehensibility of such a notion (be it well understood) against which the objection lies, for as life begins and ends in mystery, that would be no objection; it lies in the rashness of attempting to solve an admitted mystery, by placing a palpable absurdity in its room; vainly and irreverently arrogating to itself the honours of a discovery which we are to believe if we can! At this rate, addled eggs, abandoned by the vital principle, might take to hatching themselves! A more legitimate and very interesting subject for inquiry is, whether those funguses which are parasitical (i. e. derive their support from the structures whence they emanate) are so many separate constituents of a superior life under analysis, or each of itself a new individual? In support of the first view, it is urged that since reproduction in such lower existences is nothing but a modification of nutrition, a new process might well originate from its perversion, and thus give rise to new products; and just as the change in the ordinary nutrition of our bodily organs is prone to give birth to various local disorganizations or morbid growths, such, it is argued, might be the origin of fungoid growth on trees. But then comes the difficulty: such a view does not, and plainly cannot, explain the development of the not parasitical kinds, of which the origin should be the same; no, nor even of all that live by suction at the expense of other plants, since there are as many kinds which quicken in dead and decaying structures, as there are that issue out of decrepit and living ones; here, then, it is plain that perverted nutrition can have nothing to do with their production, for in this case nutrition has, by the supposition, ceased; and to talk of disease after death would be a strange figure of speech indeed! An elm or oak is frequently dead five, seldom less than three, years before these parasitical growths make their appearance, from which it would appear to follow that seeds are not developed by, but that they must be extraneous to, and independent of, any pathological relation of the plant from which they grow. If then fungus life be not to be sought for, and cannot with propriety be said to originate in any morbid conditions of the tissues from which they spring, whence do they derive life—in other words, whence in every instance comes that particular seed which, when quickened, is to produce after its kind? Lies this dormant for a season in those dead and decaying tissues, which a little later the plant originating from it is destined to embellish; or is the living germ first brought to them by the winds, and merely deposited on their surface, as in a fitting nidus on which their future development is to be effected? Some writers take one view, some another. Many believe the seeds of funguses to come directly from the earth,[103] and to be drawn up with the sap, which, as it penetrates throughout the tissues of the plant, must carry the seeds also along with it. That such is actually sometimes the case is certain, since we can not only plant parasitical blights of a particular kind so as to infect particular plants, but may also by digging a trench between those that have already become diseased, and those that are still healthy, stay the progress of the blight—thus clearly establishing not only the fact of seeds, but also the highly interesting additional one, of their ascent into the structures of plants by intus-susception; and to arrive at a general view from these particular cases, this would seem to be the usual mode of their propagation. Neither does it make against this view nor is it more in favour of the other, which supposes the germs to be derived primarily from the air, and to be thence precipitated on the structures where they grow, that funguses are found on organizations in decay, on withered boughs, and on seared leaves, out of which all sap must of course have been long ago exsiccated; for what then? though the sap does, the seeds do not, evaporate with it. These, once absorbed and diffused during the lifetime of the plant throughout its whole economy, remain there in a state of potential activity, ready to burst forth and germinate whenever the necessary conditions for these wonderful changes shall be presented to them, just as though the seeds of corn now flourishing in different parts of England, had first existed for some thousand years as mummy wheat, potentially and unquickened. Nothing perishes in nature: “destructio unius matrix alterius;” life may change titles, but never becomes extinct; so soon as the more perfect plant dies, a host of other vegetable existences, hitherto enthralled by laws of an organization superior to their own, now that the connection has been dissevered, put forth their separate energies, and severally assert their independence. The poplar may have perished, root, stem, and branch, but its extinction is only the signal for other existences, which had been heretofore bound up and hid within its own, to assert themselves; and accordingly a Polyporus sprouts out here; here a Thelephora embellishes the dead bark; and here an Agaric springs out of the decaying fibres of its head: these in turn also decay, but as they moulder away they languish into a new kind of fungous life, of an inferior type to the last, as if their own vitality were inferior in kind to that of the decayed poplar, whence they lately issued.[104] Thus, since the seeds of funguses actually exist in great quantity in other plants, and since they occur in the closed interior of fruits and in corollas which are still in their envelopes (in either case out of the reach of the external air); since finally, the Pietra funghaia, which produces a Polyporus unknown to England, may be, notwithstanding, made to germinate in England by furnishing the stone with adequate supplies of water and of heat, that seems the more tenable hypothesis of the two, which, in every case, supposes the nidus of the fungus to furnish the seed, and the atmosphere, the conditions necessary for its quickening. How the seed is first made to quicken is another and most interesting question, still evolved in mystery. As there is no ocular evidence to be obtained of the usual organs of sex, some mycologists have separated funguses from the family of the clandestinely married Cryptogamia, to place them with the Agamia, which repudiate the marriage tie;[105] but as every argument from ignorance is unsafe, (and such would appear to be particularly the case here, when we consider how many things undoubtedly exist, which the imperfection of lenses and the circumscribed power of the eye prevent our seeing,) we should rather make use of what is displayed to us in the economy of other plants, in the way of analogy as applied to these, than deny what is likely, merely because it is not an object of sense. It would appear then, from what has been stated, that certain funguses are produced like other plants, from seeds; and more likely at least, in the parasitic kinds, that such seeds are derived by the plant which supports them from the ground, than deposited from the atmosphere. Before we proceed to the description of species, a few more words remain to be said about these spores, and a brief notice to be taken of those parts that are essential to all, and more especially of such as are characteristic of those higher forms of funguses which are the more immediate subject of the present work.