Fig. 6, the ascus or spore sack and paraphyses.
Genus Mitrula Fries. Soft and fleshy, simple capitate, stem distinct, hymenium surrounding the inflated cap; head ovate, obtuse, inflated.—M. C. Cooke.
Cooke says of this genus that it is scarcely so well characterized as many with which it is associated, and that some of the species are evidently so closely allied to some of the species of the genus Geoglossum that it is difficult to draw the line of demarcation between them, particularly so with the species Mitrula pistillaris B. from Louisiana.
The plants are very small, and though none are recorded as poisonous, only one or two have any value as esculents.
Fig. 7. Mitrula sclerotipes Boudier.
The cap in this species is small, and the stem long and slender. The spores are transparent, the asci club-shaped. The plants of this species are always found springing from an oblong sclerotium; hence the name sclerotipes.
Fig. 8 represents the sporidia enclosed in their asci with paraphyses and individual spores, the latter magnified 800 diameters. Fig. 9, sectional view of mature plant.
Fig. 10. Mitrula vitellina Sacc., var. irregularis Peck.
Saccardo, in his Sylloge Fungorum, includes in this genus those having a club-shaped cap, which brings into it, with others, the species Mitrula vitellina Sacc., formerly classed in the genus Geoglossum, and its variety irregularis Peck. The latter was first described in 1879, in Peck's Thirty-Second Report, under the name Geoglossum irregulare. Prof. Peck now gives preference to the name assigned to it by Saccardo, and it is so recorded in Peck's later reports.