[Illustration: POLYPORUS SULPHUREUS.]
[Sidenote: =Its ornamental attributes=]
The freely expanded specimen of this species is full of beauty, in
its wavy fan-like form and flowing lines and flutings presenting a
suggestive decorative theme, whether in the branches of painting,
sculpture, or the plastic arts. The pores upon its sulphurous surface
are so minute as to be scarcely visible, but they shed a copious
quantity of whitish spores. The pileus of the dried specimen is
often more or less frosted with minute white crystals--binoxalate of
potash--and the spore surface dulls to the color of buckskin.
[Sidenote: =Luminous by night=]
Another remarkable feature about this fungus, if report be true, is its
visibility by night, not merely from its pale yellow hue, but by an
actual flood of bluish luminous phosphorescent light, the environment
of its haunt in the woods sometimes being lighted up by the effulgence
from its ample mass of growth, a resource not uncommon among the fungi,
and popularly known under the name of "foxfire." This phenomenon is
frequently observable in woods at night, following rainy weather.
An old stump or prostrate log will appear streaked with lines of
brilliant light. If we approach and detach the loosened bark, its back
and the decayed surface of the log thus exposed will prove ablaze in
phosphorescence, whose presence had scarcely been suspected but for the
chance fissures which revealed the telltale streaks. I recall from my
boyhood experience one such midnight episode as this in which, from the
peculiar outline of the fallen trunk and the coincident circumstance
of two approximate dots of brilliant light suggesting the eyes of a
huge puma or tiger, I stood spell-bound with momentary fear, until I
realized that the apparition was only a bugaboo after all. Approaching
in the darkness, I soon laid hold of the rough head of the monster, and
with a strong pull at the mass of bark of which it was composed, laid
bare several square feet of blazing phosphorescence whose only hint
had gleamed through those two imaginary eyes, which proved to be holes
which had disclosed the hidden luminous fungus. One authority describes
a single mass of this phosphorescence as extending the entire length of
a prostrate trunk thirty feet long.
Hawthorne records having made good use of foxfire upon one occasion
when, left in the lurch at night by a canal-boat, he procured a
phosphorescent flambeau which effectually lighted his path for several
miles through the otherwise impassable woods.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: _Miscellaneous Fungi_]