Our Edible Toadstools and Mushrooms and How to Distinguish Them / A Selection of Thirty Native Food Varieties Easily Recognizable by their Marked Individualities, with Simple Rules for the Identification of Poisonous Species

by W. Hamilton Gibson

Spore-mist from an Agaric

This dust-shower is continuous in nature after the perfect ripening of the spores, but it is almost impossible to conceive of such an entire absence of moving air under natural conditions as to permit even a visible hint of the spore-shower to appear beneath its respective fungus. An exception to this rule is sometimes to be seen in fungi of massed growth—as, for example, beneath such a cluster as that shown on [page 147]. Indeed, a correspondent recently described such a cluster as "enveloped in a mist of its own spores floating away in the apparently still air."

Plate XXXVII.—SPORE-PRINT OF AMANITA MUSCARIUS

Plate XXXVIII.—ACTION OF SLIGHT DRAUGHT ON SPORES

Affected by a pin-hole draft

In Plate 38 is shown a spore-print with a peculiar elongated tail. Such was the specimen which I observed when lifting the pasteboard box which had been placed above the mushroom to absolutely exclude the air. The explanation was simple when I discerned that the tapering elongation pointed directly to a tiny hole in the box barely larger than a knitting-needle.