[41] Persoon.
[42] Micheli.
[43] These last, placed in a wineglass, over a sheet of white paper, frequently disperse the seminal dust over a ring of twice the natural dimensions of the Agaric.
[44] “One dark night, about the beginning of December, while passing along the streets of the Villa de Natividade, I observed some boys amusing themselves with some luminous object, which I at first supposed to be a kind of large fire-fly; but, on making inquiry, I found it to be a beautiful phosphorescent fungus, belonging to the genus Agaricus, and was told that it grew abundantly in the neighbourhood, on the decaying leaves of a dwarf palm. Next day I obtained a great many specimens, and found them to vary from one to two and a half inches across. The whole plant gives out at night a bright phosphorescent light, of a pale greenish hue, similar to that emitted by the larger fire-flies, or by those curious, soft-bodied, marine animals, the Pyrosomæ; from this circumstance, and from growing on a palm, it is called by the inhabitants ‘Flor do Coco;’ the light given out by a few of these fungi in a dark room, was sufficient to read by. It proved to be quite a new species, and, since my return from Brazil, has been described by the Rev. M. J. Berkeley under the name of Agaricus Gardneri, from preserved specimens which I brought home.”—Travels in the Interior of Brazil, 1846.
[45] Hence it was called κρανίον (vide Theoph. Lib. vol. i. cap. 9) by the ancients. Cesalpinus describes it under the name of Peziza, and reports that it is common in the woods of Pisa, whence men gather to eat them. We read also, in an ancient Italian writer (Cicinelli), that the environs of Padua produce enormous puff-balls, of which one (unless this author was given to puffing) measured not less than two feet across, in one direction, being upwards of a foot and a half in its least diameter. It was big enough, he says, to have written on its rind the celebrated inscription attributed by Dion Cassius to the Dacians, which they presented to the Emperor, “in quo scriptum erat Latinis literis Burros sociosque omnes eum hortari ut domum reverteretur pacemque coleret.” Other authors also (Alph. de Tuberibus,—not truffles, but puff-balls,—cap. xvii.; Imperato, Hist. Nat. Hol. vol. xxvii. cap. 5) speak of puff-balls of sixty and one hundred pounds weight.
[46] Hist. Plant. vol. ii. p. 275.
[47] Villæ, Lib. vol. x. cap. 80.
[48] By this word, however, the vulgar generally understood the Cantharellus cibarius.
[49] This species, which is somewhat rare in England, occurred in abundance this year (1847) in the neighbourhood of Tunbridge Wells. I found four specimens of it on the oak-roots in the Grove, one of which rose nearly a foot from the ground, measured considerably more than two and a half feet across, and weighed from eighteen to twenty pounds; the other specimens were of much smaller dimensions.
[50] Robert Scott, Act. Linn. Soc. vol. viii. p. 202.