A week ago this glistening gray bag, so free with its dust-puff at the slightest touch, was solid in substance and as white as cottage cheese in the fracture. In this condition, sliced and fried, it would have proven a veritable delicacy upon our table, quite suggesting an omelet in consistency and flavor, and in size also, if perchance we had been favored with one of the larger specimens, which frequently approaches the dimensions of a football.
Development of spores
But in a later stage this clear white fracture would have appeared speckled or peppered with gray spots ([see page 271]), and the next day entirely gray and much softened, and, later again, brown and apparently in a state of decay. But this is not decay. This moist brown mass by evaporation becomes powdery, and the Puff-ball is now ripe, and preparing for posterity.
Buoyant spore-atoms
Number of spores
Each successive squeeze, as we hold it between our fingers, yields its generous response in a puff of brown smoke, which melts away apparently into air. But the Puff-ball does not thus end in mere smoke. This vanishing purple cloud is composed of tiny atoms, so extremely minute as to require the aid of a powerful microscope to reveal their shapes. Each one of these atoms, so immaterial and buoyant as to be almost without gravity, floating away upon the slightest breath, or even wafted upward by currents of warm air from the heated earth, has within itself the power of reproducing another clump of Puff-balls, if only fortune shall finally lodge it in congenial soil. These spores are thus analogous to the seeds of ordinary plants. The number of these vital atoms or spores in a single Puff-ball is almost past computation. Fries, however, an eminent fungologist, went to some pains to estimate this number, and, referring to a certain puff-ball, says: "The spores are infinite. In a single individual of Reticularia maxima I have reckoned ten millions so subtle as to resemble thin smoke as light as if raised by evaporation, and dispersed in so many ways—by the sun's attraction, by insects, by adhesion and elasticity—that it is difficult to conceive the spots from which they could be excluded."
Spore-cloud from mushrooms
We have seen the myriad-fold dispersion of its potential atoms in the cloud of spore-smoke, but who ever thinks of a spore-cloud from a mushroom or a toadstool? Yet the method of the Puff-ball is followed by all the other fungi, with only less conspicuousness. The Puff-ball gives a visible salute, but any one of the common mushrooms or toadstools will afford us a much prettier and more surprising account of itself if we but give it the opportunity. This big yellow toadstool out under the poplar-tree—its golden cap studded with brownish scurfy warts, its under surface beset with closely plaited laminæ or gills—who could ever associate the cloud of dry smoke with this moist, creamy-white surface? We may sit here all day and watch it closely, but we shall see no sign of anything resembling smoke or dust, albeit a filmy emanation is continually eluding us, floating away from beneath its golden cap, the eager breeze taking such jealous care of the continual shower that our eyes fail to perceive a hint of it.
Catching the spores
Do you doubt it? You need wait but a few moments for a visible demonstration of the fact in a pretty experiment, which, when once observed, will certainly be resorted to as a frequent pastime in leisure moments when the toadstool or mushroom is available.