No young or immature specimens were seen, and the description is to that extent incomplete. Peck, 51st Rep. N.Y. State Bot.
By a painting made by the writer September, 1885, Professor Peck identified the species of which it is a picture as B. nebulosus Pk. The following notes accompany it, which have been verified many times since their writing:
Oak woods. West Philadelphia, Pa., September. Mt. Gretna, Pa., September.
Pileus chestnut-brown and darker, covered with small, low, black spots; convex, often depressed in center, sharp on margin. Flesh white, thick, solid, unchangeable. Tubes very small, and light pinkish-brown. When touched they change to a deeper hue. Stem same color as pileus, but a shade lighter, solid, scurfy, having a striate appearance, enlarging toward base.
Taste sweet and pleasant. Cooked it is juicy, meaty and very fine.
B. ful´vus Pk.—brownish-yellow. (Plate [CXVI], fig. 3, p. 420.) Pileus thick, convex or subcampanulate, dry, glabrous, rimose-areolate, tawny-yellow, the extreme margin dark-brown. Flesh spongy, tough, white, slowly assuming a reddish tint upon exposure to the air. Tubes rather long, ventricose, depressed around the stem and free or nearly so, greenish-yellow, the mouths small, tawny-yellow. Stem rather long, often narrowed and striate at the top, dotted with brownish-orange granules or points, radicating, tough, stuffed with greenish-yellow fibers, colored like the pileus. Spores unknown.
Pileus 2–3 in. broad. Stem 4–5 in. long, 4–8 lines thick.
Cespitose on decaying stumps. West Philadelphia, Pa. August. McIlvaine.
Mr. McIlvaine says that there were between twenty and thirty specimens on and about an old stump and that they were as attractive to the eye as a cluster of Clitocybe illudens. Peck, Bull. Torrey Bot. Club, Vol. 27, January, 1900.
Excellent in flavor, rather spongy, but fine.