The dusty puff-ball, floating its faint trail of smoke in the breeze
from the ragged flue at its dome-shaped roof as from an elfin tepee,
or perhaps enveloping our feet in its dense purple cloud as we chance
to step upon it in the path, is familiar to every one--always
enthusiastically welcomed by the small boy, to whom it is always a
challenge for a kick, and a consequent demonstration of smoke worthy
of a Fourth-of-July celebration.
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.
But in a later stage this clear white fracture would have appeared
speckled or peppered with gray spots, 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 becomes
powdery by evaporation, and the puff-ball is now _ripe_, and intent
only on posterity.
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 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. We have seen the
myriadfold dispersion of its potential atoms in the cloud of
spore-smoke from the puff-ball, but who ever thinks of a spore-cloud
from a mushroom or a toadstool? Yet the same method is followed by all
the other fungi, but with 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 laminae 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. But even so, a filmy
mist is continually 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.
Do you doubt it? You need wait but a few moments for a proof 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 at hand.
[Illustration: Spore Surface of a Polyporus]
Here is a very ordinary-looking specimen growing beside the stone
steps at our back door perhaps. Its top is gray; its gills beneath are
fawn-color. We may shake it as rudely as we will, and yet we shall get
no response such as the puff-ball will give us. But let us lay it upon
a piece of white paper, gills downward, on the mantel, and cover it
with a tumbler or finger-bowl, so as to absolutely exclude the least
admission of air. At the expiration of five minutes, perhaps, we may
detect a filmy, pinkish-yellow tint on the paper, following beneath
the upraised border of the cap, like a shadow faintly lined with
white. In a quarter of an hour the tinted deposit is perceptible
across the room; and in an hour, if we carefully raise the mushroom,
the perfect spore-print is revealed in all its beauty--a pink-brown
disk with a white centre, which represents the point of contact of the
cut stem, and white radiating lines, representing the edges of the
thin gills, many of them as fine and delicate as a cobweb.
[Illustration: Spore Surface of an Agaric]
Every fresh species will yield its surprise in the markings and color
of the prints.
These spore-deposits are of course fugitive, and will easily rub off
at the slightest touch. But inasmuch as many of these specimens,
either from their beauty of form or exquisite color, or for
educational or scientific purposes, it will be desirable to preserve,
I append simple rules for the making of the prints by a process by
which they will become effectually "fixed," and thus easily kept
without injury.