Toadstools, mushrooms, fungi, edible and poisonous; one thousand American fungi / How to select and cook the edible; how to distinguish and avoid the poisonous, with full botanic descriptions. Toadstool poisons and their treatment, instructions to students, recipes for cooking, etc., etc.

by Charles McIlvaine; Robert K. Macadam

[*] Pileus dry, silky or fibrillose.

[**] Pileus more or less viscid, smooth.

Photographed by Dr. J.R. Weist. Plate LIX.
VOLVARIA BOMBYCINA.

* Pileus dry, silky or fibrillose.

(Plate LIXa.)

Volvaria bombycina.
Natural size.

V. bombyci´na Schaeff.—bombyx, silk. Pileus 3–8 in. broad, wholly white, fleshy, soft, at first globose, soon bell-shaped, at length convex, somewhat umbonate, everywhere silky or, when older, hairy-scaled, more rarely becoming smooth at the vertex. Flesh not thick, white. Stem 3–6 in. long, ½ in. thick or more at the base, solid, equally attenuated from the base to the apex, even, smooth, white. Volva, soon torn asunder, ample, 2–3 in. broad, membranaceous, lax, slashed, somewhat viscid, persistent. Gills free, very crowded when young, almost cohering, ventricose, in groups of 2–4, then toothed, flesh-colored.

Ovate when young. According to some becoming brownish. The stem is curved-ascending on vertical trunks and straight on prostrate ones. Commonly solitary, sometimes however cespitose. Stevenson.