Lepiota cretacea is a delicious mushroom when broiled, or cooked in a chafing dish, and served on hot buttered toast. It has a pleasant taste when raw.
Lepiota Morgani Peck, the "Green-Spored Lepiota," is an exception to the general type of Lepiotas in the color of its gills and spores. It is western and southern in its range. This species is described by Peck in the Botanical Gazette of March, 1897, p. 137, as follows: "Pileus fleshy, soft, at first sub-globose, then expanded, or depressed, white, the brownish or alutaceous cuticle breaking up into scales except on the disk; lamellæ close, lanceolate, remote, white, then green; stem firm, equal, or tapering upwards, sub-bulbous, smooth, webby-stuffed, whitish, tinged with brown, annulus rather large, movable; flesh both of the pileus and stem white, changing to reddish, and then to yellowish hue when cut or bruised; spores ovate, sub-elliptical, mostly uninucleate, .0004 to .0005 inches long, .0003 to .00032 broad, sordid green.
"Plant 6 to 8 inches high, pileus 5 to 9 inches broad, stem 6 to 12 lines thick. Open dry grassy places. Dayton, Ohio. A. P. Morgan."
AGARICINI.
Genus Cortinarius Fries. This genus is distinguished by a cob-web-like veil, dry persistent gills, which in the mature plants become discolored, and pulverulent with the rusty or ochraceous colored spores. The veil is very delicate, resembling a spider's web. It is not concrete with the cuticle of the cap, but extends from its margin to the stem, in the young plants sometimes concealing the gills, but disappearing as the cap expands. Sometimes a few filaments are seen depending from the margin of the cap or encircling the stem.
In the young plants of this genus the gills vary very much in color. They are whitish, clay-color, violet, dark purple, blood-red, etc., according to species, but, as the plants mature, the gills become dusted with the rust-colored falling spores, and with age usually become a rusty ochraceous, or cinnamon color. The stem in some of the species is distinctly bulbous and in others equal, cylindrical, or tapering. In identifying the species it is necessary, in order to ascertain the true color of the gills, to examine the plants at different periods of growth.
The genus Cortinarius is a large one, and contains many beautiful species. It is mainly confined to temperate regions. Not a single species has been recorded as found in Ceylon, the West Indies, or Africa, but one tropical species is found in Brazil. Nearly four hundred species have been described, and over three hundred and seventy of these belong to the United States and Europe. A few are found in the extreme southern or temperate portion of South America, and several are reported from a temperate elevation among the Himalayas. Sweden and Great Britain, with their temperate climates, claim a large proportion of the European species. Not many of the Cortinarii have been recorded as edible, and none as dangerous. The Rev. M. J. Berkeley records, however, a case of poisoning by one of the species, C. (Inoloma) bolaris Pers., which though not fatal was somewhat alarming, the symptoms being great oppression of the chest, profuse perspiration, and the enlargement for two days of the salivary glands of the patient. I have seen no other statements relating to the poisonous properties of this species, and the results alluded to may have been owing to some individual idiosyncrasy.
Berkeley, in his "Outlines," gives the following description of this mushroom: "Pileus fleshy, obsoletely umbonate, growing pale, variegated with saffron-red, adpressed, innate scales; stem stuffed, then hollow, nearly equal, squamose, of the same color as the cap; gills subdecurrent, crowded, watery, cinnamon color. Cap 1 to 2 inches broad. Stem 2 to 3 inches long." In beech woods in September and October.
The genus Cortinarius has been divided by some authors into the following six groups: (1) Phlegmacium, in which the cap is fleshy and viscid, the veil partial, and the stem firm and dry; (2) Myxacium, in which the veil is universal and glutinous, hence the cap and stem both viscid; cap thin and the gills adnate or decurrent; (3) Inoloma, in which the cap is fleshy, dry, and at first silky with innate fibrils; veil simple and stem slightly bulbous; (4) Dermocybe, in which the pileus is thinly fleshy, dry, and at first downy, becoming smooth; the veil single and fibrillose; flesh watery, colored when moist, stem equal or attenuated downwards; (5) Telamonia, in which the cap is moist, at first smooth or dotted with the superficial fragments of the veil, the stem ringed below, or peronately scaly from the remains of the universal veil; (6) Hydrocybe, in which the cap is thin and moist, not viscid, smooth, or covered with superficial white fibrils; stem rigid, not scaly, veil thin, occasionally collapsed in an irregular ring. These subdivisions have been designated as tribes by some botanists and subgenera by others, etc. To the divisions Inoloma and Phlegmacium, respectively, belong the two species illustrated in Plate XII.