Plate 41, Figure 127.—Cantharellus aurantiacus. Color orange yellow, and cap varies ochre, raw sienna, tawny, in different specimens (natural size). Copyright.
The pileus is fleshy, rather thick, the margin thick and blunt and at first inrolled. It is convex, becoming expanded or sometimes depressed by the margin of the cap becoming elevated. The margin is often wavy or repand, and in irregular forms it is only produced at one side, or more at one side than at the other, or the cap is irregularly lobed. The gills are very narrow, stout, distant, more or less sinuous, forked or anastomosing irregularly, and because of the pileus being something like an inverted cone the gills appear to run down on the stem. The spores are faintly yellowish, elliptical, 7–10 µ. Figure [126] represents but a single specimen, and this one with a nearly lateral pileus.
Figure 128.—Cantharellus aurantiacus, under view, enlarged nearly twice, showing regularly forked gills.
Cantharellus aurantiacus Fr.—This orange cantharellus is very common, and occurs on the ground or on very rotten wood, logs, branches, etc., from summer to very late autumn. It is widely distributed in Europe and America. It is easily known by its dull orange or brownish pileus, yellow gills, which are thin and regularly forked, and by the pileus being more or less depressed or funnel-shaped. The plants are from 5–8 cm. high, the cap from 2–7 cm. broad, and the stem about 4–8 mm. in thickness.
The pileus is fleshy, soft, flexible, convex, to expanded, or obconic, plane or depressed, or funnel-shaped, the margin strongly inrolled when young, in age simply incurved, the margin plane or repand and undulate. The color varies from ochre yellow to dull orange, or orange ochraceous, raw sienna, and tawny, in different specimens. It is often brownish at the center. The surface of the pileus is minutely tomentose with silky hairs, especially toward the center, and sometimes smooth toward the margin. The flesh is 3–5 mm. at the center, and thin toward the margin. The gills are arcuate, decurrent, thin, the edge blunt, but not so much so as in a number of other species, crowded, regularly forked several times, at length ascending when the pileus is elevated at the margin. The color of the gills is orange to cadmium orange, or sometimes paler, cadmium yellow or deep chrome. The stem is clay color to ochre yellow, enlarged below, spongy, stuffed, fistulose, soft, fibrous, more or less ascending at the base.
The taste is somewhat nutty, sometimes bitterish. The plants in Fig. [127] (No. 3272, C. U. herbarium) were collected near Ithaca, October 7, 1899.