Wessington Springs herald. (Wessington Springs, Aurora County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1891, 1884-01-04
Curious Facts About a Vegetable Vaga.
bond.

A common object of the country is
the fungus, and scarcely less familiar,
in wooded districts especially, the
fungus-hunter. He is usually of a seri-
Gus sort, and may be seen furtively
turning over dead leaves, as if looking
for the remains of a corpse which he
knows to be Whereabouts and yet breads
to discover. Every now and then he
picks up a mouldy-looking thing, smells
it and puts it into his bag. The pursuit
evidently depresses him, and melan-
choly might be less aptly symbolized
than by a fungus-hunter sitting in a
damp wood. eating raw %toadstools, with
out salt. Toadstools have been much
misunderstood. The rustic calls them
'toad's meat" and tramples in his Owl
ruinous hob-nailed fashion upon them
when he sees them. Everybody thinks ill
of them. Boys throw stones at them,
and men in passing hit them with their
walking-sticks, as if they were some kind
of a nuisance. The exact explanation
of this violent manner of treating toad
stools may be that they are the vaga-
bonds of the vegetables, and without
visible means of subsistence. That plants
should grow out of the ground isnatural
enough, but that they should sprout
up ~cheerfully in a night on the side of a
paling is not altogether reasonable.
Rooted to a tenpenny nail, they initiate
themselves with moisture as if iron
mongery was s%ucculent and sappy. Give
them a wet brick and they will make
the desert blossom as a rose, covering the
sterile surface with a juicy plantation of
young umbrellas. They are, indeed,
the most easily satisfied of all vegeta-
bles. Orchids, it is true, are not exact
ing, for they will thrive upon the leg of
a chair or a shovelful of cinders, and
throw out such strands of pure and love-
ly flowers as make IN ordinary man feel
too wicked to live in the same world.
But the toadstool goes ahead of the or
child in its frugality. 1t will grow inside
a cistern with nothing but zinc to
nourish it, and shoot two feet long in a
single night upon a bar of metal. These
are facts, and very much to the credit of
the toadstool. 1t asks for nothing, and
takes it before you have time to answer.
If you put down your hat on a damp
place, the chances are that it will be
filled up with a puff-ball by the time
you want to put it on again. Some
monks had a mighty cask Of wine in the
cellar. but it was new; so they closed
the cellar for the wine to get old, and
they let it alone for three years and then
went to drink it. But they had over
looked a leak, and the whole of the
wine had turned into fat vinous fun
guses, the Abbots of all funguses, which
nearly filled the cellar, and had lifted
the empty tun, as if in triumph, up to
the ceiling. In Basingstoke, not long
ago, toadstools heaved up the pave
ment of the street as if they were uneasy
ghosts, and kitchen h%earthstoncs have
been known to get solemnly up on end,
while spectral funguses thrust their
heads out of the aperture.
Even the putf-ball which children play
with has p%rodigious potentialities. it
multiplies it's cells at the rate of sixty
million in the minute, and where there
was nothing the night before you may
find next morning the ground covered
with things as big us a pumpkin, and
solid enough to throw at q neighbor.
Put a man and aputf-ball into a suitable
cellar together, and leave them alone,
and the puff-ball would possibly smother
the man. So when we laugh at the
toadstools we are not always on safe
ground. Smut and rust, dry rot and
mildew already triumph over us and
ours, but suppose Polyporus squamosus
took to growing upon the backs of
booksin the library, or upon household
%flannels, invaded II jampots and our
cruets, and took possession of our boots
and our belongings? Polyporus
sguamosus increases at the rate of about
nine pounds Il week, and in a month
measures some eight feet in circumfer-
ence. What would the cook say to a
hundred weight of this turbulent toad
stool in the larder when she came back
to town, or the master of the house at
finding his study occupied by furlongs
of this outrageous fungus? AS it IS,
we grumble at the invasion of the tinv
species Of this much abused family, but
let us be content that their big brothers
do not accompany them in their incur
sions.-London Telegraph.