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

BOLE´TUS Dill.

Gr—a clod.

The name of a fungus considered a great delicacy among the Romans, derived from bolos, a clod, probably to denote the round figure of the plant.

Hymenium wholly composed of small tubes, connected together in a stratum, the surface of which is dotted with their poriform mouths, and which is distinct from the hymenophore on account of the latter not descending into a trama. Tubes packed close together, easily separating from the hymenophore and from one another. Pores or mouths of the tubes round or angular (in the subgenus Gyrodon sinuous or gyroso-plicate). Spores normally fusiform, rarely oval or somewhat round. Growing on the ground, fleshy, putrescent, with central stems. Mostly edible, and of importance as articles of food; a few poisonous. Fries.

No American species in Gyrodon. It is therefore omitted in synopsis of tribes. C.M.

This genus abounds in species and is related to Boletinus on one hand and to Polyporus on the other. From the latter it is distinguished by the absence of a trama and from both by the tubes being easily separable from the hymenophore and from each other. Some of the species are very variable, others are so closely allied that they appear to almost run together.

The species are generally terrestrial, but B. hemichrysus is habitually wood-growing, and others are occasionally so.

The spores vary so much in color in such closely related species that this character is scarcely available for general classification, but it is valuable as a specific character and should always be noted.

SYNOPSIS OF THE TRIBES.