Mycology

“ We encourage them to take up the pursuit of botany, or chemistry, or geology; we bid them collect fossils, mosses, moths—go down even to postage-stamps; we are glad to find them engaged in observing the habits of the earthworm, and studying the life evolution of the daddy-longlegs, but never think of urging them to descend among our people and probe the deep mysteries of their existence. ”

“ But it would be wonderfully interesting to watch the growth of such a fungus. You could see it grow. In one night you could see its whole life, from almost nothing at all to that enormous ball in the picture. Nature could hardly show us a more astonishing sight than that. ”

“ Can we believe that these forces, as they are known to us from innumerable experiments, could, if left to themselves, have formed an oak, or even raised a mushroom? Can we believe that they could have organised the acorn or the spore, and hidden in those minute bodies the power of reproducing the parent? And yet without them the vegetable cannot exist. ”

“ Now, nature might have made one kind of cell and magic jelly for the fungi, and another kind for green plants, but she didn't. She seems to like to see how many different things she can make of a few simple things. All the plants and animals begin to grow in a little cell of protoplasm. So, when we understand the fungi, the simplest of all plants, we have learned the A. B. C.'s of life. Knowing the letters, we can spell the words and read the story of the living world. (See Fungi, Yeast, Mould, Mildew, Rust, Smut, Mushrooms, Toadstools, etc.) ”

“ We shall also show that all living organisms, such as seeds, fungus-spores, morphological cells, etc., perish at a temperature of about 100° C., and that Bacteria, Torulæ, and other infusorial forms, making their appearance in super-heated flasks, originate not from morphological cells, plastide particles, bioplasts, or any other vital organism, but from indestructible vital units, which are everywhere present in the organic matter of our globe, and ready to burgeon forth into life whenever the necessary vital conditions exist, and the proper incidences of environment occur. ”

“ Antiquity of Plants as affecting their Distribution.—We have already referred to the importance of great antiquity in enabling us to account for the wide dispersal of some genera and species of insects and land-shells, and recent discoveries in fossil botany show that this cause has also had great influence in the case of plants. Rich floras have been discovered in the Miocene, the Eocene, and the Upper Cretaceous formations, and these consist almost wholly of living genera, and many of them of species very closely allied to existing forms. ”

“ II. STRUCTURE. Without some knowledge of the structure of fungi, it is scarcely possible to comprehend the principles of classification, or to appreciate the curious phenomena of polymorphism. Yet there is so great a variety in the structure of the different groups, that this subject cannot be compressed within a few paragraphs, neither do we think that this would be desired if practicable, seeing that the anatomy and physiology of plants is, in itself, sufficiently important and interesting to warrant a rather extended and explicit survey. ”

“ Under whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus or oak; worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it died. ”

“ Thus it is in the clearing of our American woodlands; where we burn down a forest of stately pines, a progeny of dwarf oaks start up in their place; and we never see the prostrate trunk of a tree mouldering into soil, but it gives birth to a whole tribe of fungi.
Let us not then, lament over the decay and oblivion into which ancient writers descend; they do but submit to the great law of Nature, which declares that all sublunary shapes of matter shall be limited in their duration, but which decrees, also, that their element shall never perish. ”

“ It may seem a small thing to admit that the dull vital actions of a fungus, or a foraminifer, are the properties of their protoplasm, and are the direct results of the nature of the matter of which they are composed. ”

“ But notwithstanding the qualifications suggested by such cases, it needs but to compare a microscopic fungus with an oak, an animalcule with a shark, a mouse with a man, to recognize the fact that this increasing correspondence of its changes with those of the environment which characterizes progressing life, habitually shows itself at the same time in continuity and in complication. ”

“ Lindley's Medical and Economic Botany, I find that many fungi are the active elements of disease, and in a manner which renders it highly improbable that they are so in any other way, than by obtaining an entrance to the sap of the plants. ”

“ If we pluck a flower, in its bosom we see many a charming insect. If we pick up a fallen leaf, there is probably the trace of an insect larvæ hidden in its tissue. The drop of dew upon this leaf will probably contain its animals, visible under the microscope. The very mould which covers our cheese, our bread, our jam, or our ink, and disfigures our damp walls, is nothing but a collection of plants.
The starting point of life is a single cell-that is to say a microscopic sac filled with liquid and granules, and having within it a nucleus, or smaller sac. ”

“ It is to the cultivation and close investigation of the growth and metamorphoses of the minute fungi that we must look for the most important additions which have yet to be made to our knowledge of the life-history of these most complex and interesting organisms. ”

“ Next to the floral orchids, the mechanism of our milkweed blossom is perhaps the most complex and remarkable, and illustrates as perfectly as any of the orchid examples given in Darwin's noble work the absolute divine intention of the dependence of a plant species upon the visits of an insect. ”

“ Darwin says: [2] "In a highly organized and complex animal, the gemmules thrown off from each different cell or unit throughout the body must be inconceivably numerous and minute. Each unit of each part, as it changes during development—and we know that some insects undergo at least twenty metamorphoses—must throw off its gemmules. All organic beings, moreover, include many dormant gemmules derived from their grandparents and more remote progenitors, but not from all their progenitors. ”

“ In every upward step taken by plant life there is a story, just as interesting as the stories of the cell, the fungi, the green algae, the liver-worts, the mosses and the ferns. It would take a big book to trace all of these steps. ”

“ Let us quit the infusoria and glance with our microscopic eye at some other marvellous objects belonging to the invisible world. If we look through our magic tube at the downy mould formed upon any decaying substance, a wonderful forest of delicate thread-like plants will be revealed. These beautiful fungi will be seen to multiply and grow, to swell and finally to burst, scattering their invisible spores into the surrounding air.
If we make use of our microscope to examine the eggs of insects we shall have cause to wonder at their elaborate carving and beautiful forms. ”

“ The pupil should know that every spot or injury on a leaf or stem is caused by something,—as an insect, a fungus, wind, hail, drought, or other agency. How many uninjured or perfect leaves are there on the plant growing nearest the schoolhouse steps? ”

“ And in all their extended family groups, pervading nature as widely as animal and vegetable life, we find that uniform chemical and other conditions produce uniform mycological results. Spores are no more necessary for their appearance, in the first instance, than acorns are essential to the appearance of an oak forest when it succeeds the pine. ”

“ The biology of the fungi, their life habits, conditions of spore formation, characters of growth, relation to light, heat, moisture, nutriment, etc.; their resistance to adverse conditions, their longevity under various conditions of environment are all problems of ultimate practicality. ”

“ And thus we might proceed through all the orchid genera, each new device, though based upon one of the foregoing plans, affording its new surprise in its special modification in adaptation to its insect sponsor—all these various shapes, folds of petals, positions, colors, the size, length, and thickness of nectary, the relative positions of pollen and stigma, embodying an expression of welcome to the insect with which its life is so marvellously linked. ”

“ This class of organisms affords an interesting example of the impossibility of maintaining a hard and fast line between the animal and plant kingdom. Zoologists and Botanists usually include the Myxomycetes [399] in the text-books of their respective subjects, and the name Animal-fungi which has been applied to these organisms expresses their dual relationship. ”

“ According to the Vestiges of Creation, terrestrial botany began with classes of comparatively simple forms and structure. In the ranks of the vegetable kingdom the lowest place is taken by plants of cellular tissue, and which have no flowers, as lichens, mosses, fungi, ferns, and sea-weeds. ”

“ We must be content to follow the evolution of the higher types of organisms. I will therefore first describe the advance of the Tertiary vegetation, the luxuriance of which was the first condition of the great expansion of animal life; then we will glance at the grand army of the insects which followed the development of the flowers, and at the accompanying expansion and ramification of the birds. The long and interesting story of the mammals must be told in a separate chapter, and a further chapter must be devoted to the appearance of the human species. ”

“ The vegetation, though luxuriant of its kind, grew much less dense, and we came at length to more or less open country. There plant life was represented by mushroom-like fungi arranged in clumps over the plain. ”

“ The group of plants represented upon the plate is not merely a family of toadstools, but a collection of fungi. By their unlike characters they belong to separate groups in this class, and each has its separate name; [1] for nomenclature must keep pace with science, and its higher discriminations require separate technical terms to mark them. Some people cry out against a few strange words in botany, and make it an excuse for neglecting the study ”

“ But no more illustrative example can be offered of the properties of protoplasm as living matter, independently of any part it may take in organization, than that presented by the Myxomycetæ.
The Myxomycetæ constitute a group of remarkable organisms, which, from their comparatively large size and their consisting, during a great part of their lives, of naked protoplasm, have afforded a fine field for research, and have become one of the chief sources from which our knowledge of the nature and phenomena of protoplasm has been derived. ”

“ As the discoveries of the microscopists continued to build up our knowledge of the anatomy of plants and began to elucidate the biology of the fungi and other cryptogams, while the chemists and physiologists laid the foundations of our modern science of plant life, it gradually became possible to tabulate and classify plant diseases, and discuss their symptoms and causes in a more scientific manner. ”

“ The dense white lacework of the root system or mycelium, which gives off a phosphorescent light, may permeate the entire tree and extend even into the fibers at the base of the tree. Wood infested with the fungus can glow in the dark, sometimes so brightly that a man could read his watch by its light. ”

“ One is conscious of vast trackless wastes of heath and moor, of impenetrable forests and terror-infested bogs; but of the details of plant life there is scarcely a word. In these manuscripts alone do we find what plant life meant to our ancestors, and, as with all primitive nations, their belief in the mystery of herbs is almost past our civilised understanding. ”

“ Before describing a few examples of fossil fungi, it is important to consider the general question of their manner of occurrence and determination. Considering the small size and delicate nature of most fungi, it is not surprising that we have but few satisfactory records of well-defined fossil forms. ”

“ The mycelium, or vegetable part of the fungus, burrows in the tissues of the tree, and often destroys it; the “bracket” represents the fruiting stage, and produces innumerable spores which gain entrance to other trees by some wound or cut surface ”

“ Hence has emanated that more recondite part of medicine which compares the Signatures or Characterisms of natural things with the members of the human body, and by magnetically applying like to like produces marvellous effects in the preservation of human health. In this way, the occult properties of plants—first of those that are endowed with life, and secondly of those destitute of life—are indicated by resemblances; for all exhibit to man, by their Signatures and Characterisms, both their powers, by which they can heal, and the diseases in which they are useful. ”

“ The small apparent quantity of matter that exists in the universe compared to that of spirit, and the short time in which the recrements of animal or vegetable bodies become again vivified in the forms of vegetable mucor or microscopic insects, seems to have given rise to another curious fable of antiquity. ”