Crepidotus mollis (Fries) Kummer Soft slipper toadstool
Cap: up to 45 mm across and in tiers, sessile, shell-shaped or kidney-shaped, smooth, rubbery and brownish ochre in colour.
Gills: pale buff then cinnamon-brown and finally flushed snuff-brown, thin and crowded.
Flesh: watery, gelatinous beneath the skin of the cap and whitish buff.
Spore-print: warm brown.
Spores: ellipsoid, smooth, medium-sized, pale buff under the microscope and 8-9 × 5-5·5 µm in size.
Easily recognised by the soft elastic cap which can be stretched without breaking, the brown gills and pale buff spores. (See [Plate 49], [p. 153].)
Illustrations: LH 177; NB 1453; WD 691.
The artificiality of classifying all those agarics with both a spoon-shaped or bracket-shaped fruit-body, and a reduced (or lacking) stem is further exemplified by the presence of similar genera in other groups of fungi. For instance Claudopus is typified by pink, angular spores ([Plate 28]) and Clitopilus is characterised by longitudinally ridged spores, i.e. they are not angular in all optical sections but only when seen end on (see [p. 101]). An example of the former is C. parasiticus (Quélet) Ricken which grows on dead remains of woody fungi, and of the latter C. passackerianus (Pilát) Singer which may invade mushroom beds. Both species are quite small though the last fungus is similarly coloured to the more familiar Clitopilus prunulus (Fries) Kummer, ‘The Miller’, so common in woods and fields.
Thus in the British Isles agarics with eccentric stems may be found, in the white, brown and pink-spored groups—and in the tropics and subtropics the picture is completed by the existence of the genus Melanotus in the black-spored agarics. M. bambusinus Pat. grows on bamboos and M. musae (Berk. & Curt.) Singer grows on dead leaves and debris of bananas; the latter is also a probable agent in the decay of fibres in the tropics.