Let us turn our attention to teratology in fungi, for it would be unseemly for true Woolhopeans not to have their minds directed to that branch of botany if possible. Here I find that the ground has been so weli trodden, that there remains but little for me to do. Amongst the larger kinds, in your Transactions for 1881-82, at page 103, our friend Mr. Phillips gives us a paper on "Monstrosities in Fungi," added to which is a plate figured by himself of some 28 eccentricities. By this means we get at one view some most extraordinary freaks of fungi. To look at them is enough. They seem to be capable of existing in any way except the normal one. They are kicking up behind and before. They seem to live quite composedly with their heels high in the air, or at any angle on which fortune has favoured their growth, and to start their life from the pileus of one of their own species. The most remarkable of all the plants figured seems to me to be No. 28, on the plate where we have the common mushroom (Ag. campestris) hoisted on the pileus of a plant in its usual position of growth, but the strangest thing of all is that this abnormal growth has two pilei, with one stem common to both, and this one stem has only one veil, or rather the remains of one veil, for both plants. One would think that sporting to this excess could scarcely be exceeded.

Whilst speaking of fungi, I am able to recall some decided cases of teratology amongst the microscopical forms. To classify the occurrence of 16 sporidia within the ascus of Sphæria herbarium (Pers.) would perhaps be admitted, as it generally has only eight, but Sphæria herbarium never confines itself to any undeviating course of conduct; it is apt to take freaks.

The singularly divided spores of Puccinia conii (Fckl.) as recorded by me in your Transactions for 1877, p. 58, added to those given by Mr. Plowright in his British Uredinece and Ustilaginea, in which the separation of Puc. bullata, as found by Professor Trail, is recorded, and of Puc. lychnidearum by the Rev. Dr. Keith, as well as the specimen on Lolium perenne by Mr. Plowright, and Puc. betonica by Mr. Grove, all prove the sporting possibility of these minute forms.

Then again, I had a slide of Triphragmium ulmariæ containing uniseptate spores, also triseptate and quadriseptate spores. There is one curved spore which is a great contrast to all the others. They are straight, this one is extraordinarily bent.

These few instances are enough to show that the microscopical forms of minute fungi vary immensely, and they are enough to lead us to the conclusion, very fairly, I think, that the eccentricities of these small forms vie with the larger ones, and are just as liable to change shape, colour, &c. The little ones are just as peculiar as their bigger specimens.

Should any of you who are not Woolhopeans, or any who are not members of our Club, now or hereafter meet with monstrous or abnormal forms of growth in vegetable life, I do hope you will not think it will be otherwise than a pleasure to me to receive them at my home, Forden Vicarage, near Welshpool.

The eccentricities are not very difficult to meet with. They need searching if you would be really and truly successful, but are very often casually met with.

To attempt to give a list of them would be too great an undertaking. In broad terms, however, flowers, leaves, stalks, stone and fleshy fruits, seeds, may yield them, so would roots and rootlets, but they are underground.

To bring the subject of teratology to a close, let us inquire of what good is the study of it?

To the minds of many persons this pursuit takes us back to former ages. We can go to geology and no doubt, not only find there forms corresponding to our present abnormal shapes, but detect also a state of things to which our flowers, shrubs, and trees revert. Some of the instances which I have named to you are considered to be descendants of an earlier general state of things. The flowers of the Scabious, for instance, are said to be only reversions to things which occurred in former conditions.

In other words, there is an occasional reproduction of vegetable life of ancient ages in our own days, thus connecting together the distant periods. Many of these eccentric shapes now were therefore the rule ages since. Our ordinary forms have evolved from what are now somewhat extraordinary to us when we meet with them.

To inquire into these things, then, nay more, to investigate them, is of use to us. Evolution is a theory we must face more and more as we live. It is too prominent for us to put on one side. Nor need we do so-quite the contrary. The terrors of it are subsiding. It will find its place, not by being shunned and hooted at, but by quietly being faced by nature's facts and the truths of science. I, for one, do not dread it. Before many generations pass-not, I expect, in our own day-but by-and-bye, it will be a hand-maid where it was expected only a few years ago to have been a giant to crush out godliness itself.

Let us take another advantage to be gained by studying the freaks of nature. They show that in most unlikely spots we may come upon monstrosities. Go and search, as I have done, for a certain thing on which you expect to find an eccentric form. You may get your plant a thousand times repeated, repeated indeed until you well might give up in despair.

Go on; success may be yours. You may find what you want. Is there no room for patience and perseverance here? Yes, both will be rewarded. You will value your discovery all the more; the fact of your having found it will be more deeply pressed on you by far than if you gained your object, as it were, by magic. What botanist is there, or scientist of any sort, who cannot associate old and pleasing ideas with what he formerly took pains, toil, and trouble to procure? Let us add patience and perseverance then to the benefits of study. They are virtues, not for ourselves only, but for the good of our neighbours too.

THE UNEXPECTED APPEARANCE OF TWO SPECIES OF FUNGUS IN A FIELD QUITE RECENTLY

UNDER CULTIVATION.

By the Rev. Canon Du PORT.

THE great dearth of fungi last year, when even the prolific slopes of Downton Castle scarcely produced more specimens than the very high road itself, will not be readily forgotten by the mycologists of Hereford. Norfolk was, if possible, more barren still, but on the 16th October a very heavy rainfall, in many places considerably exceeding an inch, softened the ground and probably stimulated the growth of those fungi whose mycelium had not withered. Two days after this rainfall, my neighbour, Mr. E. R. M. Pratt, of Ryston Hall, called to tell me of what he described as the most extraordinary show of mushrooms he had ever seen, and when I saw it I could only re-echo his words. What seemed to me more extraordinary still was that these fungi were growing among very young willows planted in a portion of a field which four years before was being cultivated under the regular rotation of agricultural crops. When the last crop of wheat off this field had been harvested, Mr. Pratt, having determined to turn the field into a nursery of timber for his estate, had it ploughed very deeply; then in the spring it was dug over again, and strips, about ten yards wide, were planted with cuttings of willows, young plants of oak, Abies Douglasii, black spruce, Pinus Cembra, and larch. On the occasion of my visit on October 18th, the strip planted with willows was so completely covered with a whitish fungus that one crushed three or four every time one set one's foot on the ground. These were of one and only one species, covered with gluten as copiously as Cortinarius mucifluus, the gills distilling moisture freely, the stem scaly from top to bottom, but more thickly so at the top; the colour and appearance of the pileus just that of Agaricus Hebeloma crustuliniformis, but the gills half an inch or more broad; and the smell very faint and rather sweet. On comparing my plant with Fries' description of Ag. crustuliniformis, I was much puzzled by his description of the gills as "angustatæ 1 lin. latæ et lineares" and of the smell as "ingratus raphanoideus," so I turned to Ag. Hebeloma glutinosus, and Ag. Flammula lentus, and gummosus. There were serious points of difference from all these, so I sent off a box to Dr. Cooke, and the next day, having to pass through Lynn, I took several to Mr. Plowright, in whose library after some search we found a figure of Persoon's (I think) representing Ag. crustuliniformis with gills quite as broad as those in my specimens. I was much confirmed in my first impressions as to Ag. crustuliniformis, and Mr. Plowright had no doubt about the determination. A few days after I gathered some fresh specimens, and sent one box to Mr. Phillips, one to Mr. Bucknall, and one to Monsieur Boudier at Montmorency. All of these pronounced in favour of Ag. crustuliniformis, and the latter added that he had recognised the peculiar smell of radish, and had also previously found specimens with very broad gills.

At this time there was not another kind of fungus to be seen in the whole field. Three days later the bed of Abies Douglasii was nearly as full of Ag. Hebeloma mesophæus as the willow bed had been of the other fungus, while a few of each kind were to be found among the oaks.

The question to which I would invite the attention of the distinguished mycologists here present is, whence came this sudden development of two distinct species in land which had very lately been under regular cultivation? I cannot learn from any of the labourers on the estate that they had ever seen "toadscaps," as we call them in Norfolk, growing near the willows, two miles off, from which the cuttings had been taken, though they had often seen some big ones growing out of the pollard tops of the willows. The most firmly convinced heterocismist will hardly claim this appearance as an illustration of his theory. But again, I ask, whence came they? and further, whence came the Ag. mesophæus among the firs? and why was each species confined to the bed of its favourite host? A plantation of less than fifty years' growth is a place which most of us would carefully avoid if we were in search of fungi, and here was a field, barely emancipated from the plough, all of a sudden converted into a very garden of fungi.

With reference to the Rev. Canon Du Port's paper; some members suggested that it would be advisable to discover whether a wood had covered this site in olden times. The Rev. Canon has received the information from Mr. Pratt that the locality is "described in one of his old maps as cultivated land in 1635."

ON THE APPEARANCE OF A RED SCUM ON A SHEET OF WATER AT LLANDRINDOD.

THE REV. W. H. Purchas, on a visit to Llandrindod in the month of August, had his attention attracted to a scarlet film on the surface of one of the pools of water there. He reports that his interest was first aroused by observing it from a distance, and on approaching the lake, he found that it extended for several yards from the bank, and for perhaps a distance of one hundred yards along the side of the lake. It reminded him of a highly amusing account of a "bloody pond" at Garendon, in Leicestershire, which is to be found in Potter's History of Charnwood Forest (London, 1842, Hamilton, Adams & Co.), being an extract from a work printed in London by J. H., 1645:-"The most strange and wonderful apparition of blood in a pool at Garraton,* in Leicestershire, which continued for the space of four days, the redness of the colour for the space of those four days increasing higher and higher, to the infinite amazement of many hundreds of beholders of all degrees and conditions, who have dipped their handkerchiefs in this bloody pool; the scarlet complexion of the linen will be a testimonial of this wonderful truth to many succeeding generations." The appari tion spread consternation far and wide amongst the people in those sad times of 1645.

Upon this subject Mr. Purchas sends us the following extract from a paper read by the late Mr. Edwin Brown, of Burton-on-Trent, to the Midland Scientific Association, December 17th, 1864. A few years ago, our esteemed member, the Rev. Andrew Bloxam, communicated to the Leicester Journal an interesting letter on the waters of a pond at Caldecote, near Nuneaton, where Captain Townshend now resides. He says, "On the way from the Rector's house, I observed a large pond in a field on the right, presenting a most extraordinary crimson appearance on the whole of its surface." He found the creature which produced this appearance to present in general a globular appearance, measuring about five-thousandths of an inch in diameter. It slowly revolved around its axis, and had the power of elongating itself like a pear, with a slight indication of a mouth at the broad end, and decreasing into a tail at the other. He named it, "Volutor sanguineus" from the peculiarities of its motion and of its colour but it is apparently an animalcule named by Ehrenberg and others, "Astasia hæmatodes." Mr. Bloxam quotes an account published in 1645 o a bloody pond at Garendon, &c., &c. Mr. Lees once observed a similar phenomenon near Malvern. He was at first under the persuasion that "the village wheelwright had emptied his paint pot into the pond."-From the Transactions of the Midland Scientific Association, Winter Session of 1864-5.

Mr. Purchas took home some of this scarlet scum wrapped up in paper. Unfortunately it did not get into the hands of experts until this October, and

* Garendon.