Common over the states. Growing on the ground in grassy places in fields and woods. August to October.
As the name implies, this species is gigantic. It is the largest of all fungi. It has attained the diameter of three feet in this country, but is reported larger in Europe. I have found it in West Virginia weighing nine pounds, but one is reported as found in Gordon Park weighing forty-seven pounds. I have often followed the advice of Vittadini and sliced a meal for my family from growing individuals. The cut surface contracts and dries. The plant seems to be deprived of its power to further ripen. It can thus be cut for many days. It has other than food uses in its dry form—as a sponge, as tinder, as a color, as a styptic in hemorrhage; the Finns make a remedy of it for diarrhea in calves, and it is burned under bee-hives to stupefy bees.
It, as well as L. cyathiforme, is an admirable and delicate fungus.
C. pachyder´ma Pk. Gr—thick-skinned. Peridium very large, globose or obovoid, often irregular, with a thick cord-like root; cortex thin, smooth, whitish, persistent, drying up into polygonal areolæ which are white in the center with a brown border; inner peridium very thick but fragile, with a separable membranaceous lining, after maturity gradually breaking up into fragments and falling away. Subgleba obsolete; mass of spores and capillitium greenish-yellow then olive-brown; the threads very long, occasionally septate, branched, mostly thinner than the spores. Spores globose, distinctly warted, 5–6µ in diameter, sometimes with a minute pedicel.
Growing on the ground. Arizona, Pringle; Dakota, Miss Nellie Crouch. Peridium 4–8 in. in diameter. Remarkable for its thick peridium, which becomes white spotted and areolate. Morgan.
I have not seen this species.
Photographed by Dr. J.R. Weist. Plate CLXII.
CALVATIA CYATHIFORMIS.
(Lycoperdon Cyathiforme.)
II.—Cyathiformes.
Peridium large, top-shaped, with a stout thick base; subgleba limited and concave above, persistent.