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

Agarics

Our introductory description of the Amanita presents the most perfect botanical type of a large division of the fungus tribe, the Agaricaceæ, or gill-bearing mushrooms, one of the two great orders of fungi which include the large majority of edible species.

A brief consideration of the general classification of fungi will not be out of place at the head of this chapter.

CLASSIFICATION OF FUNGI

A fungus is a cellular cryptogamous (flowerless) plant, nourished through its spawn or mycelium in place of roots, living in air, and propagated by spores.

Fungi—mycetes—are naturally subdivided into two great divisions:

1. Sporifera—those in which the spores or reproductive bodies are naked or soon exposed, as shown in illustration on [page 79].

2. Sporidiifera—in which the spores are enveloped in sacs or asci. These resemble in shape the cystidium of illustration on [page 79].

The first of these divisions—the Sporifera, or naked-spored fungi—is again subdivided into four families, as follows: