them dry; these (the architect’s and ship-builder’s bane) pick timber to pieces, as men pick oakum; nor do they confine their selective ravages to plants alone, they attach themselves to animal structures, and destroy animal life; the _Onygena equina_ has a particular fancy for the hoofs of horses and for the horns of cattle, sticking to these alone; the belly of a tropical fly[21] is liable, in autumn, to break out into vegetable tufts of fungous growth, and the caterpillar to carry about on his body a _Cordyceps_ larger than himself. The disease called Muscadine, which destroys so many silkworms, is also a fungus (_Botrytis Bassiana_), which in a very short time completely fills the worm with filaments very unlike those it is in the habit of secreting.[22] The vegetating wasp,[23] too, of which everybody has heard, is only another mysterious blending of vegetable with insect life. Lastly, and to take breath, funguses visit the wards of our hospitals, and grow out of the products of surgical disease.[24] Where, then, are they not to be found? do they not abound, like Pharaoh’s plagues, everywhere? is not their name legion, and their province ubiquity?[25] OF THEIR GENERAL FORMS, COLOURS, TEXTURE, TASTES, SMELLS, ETC. What geometry shall define their ever-varying shapes? who but a Venetian painter do justice to their colours?[26] or what modifications of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ convey an adequate knowledge of all their various crases and consistencies? As to shapes, some are simple threads, like the _Byssus_, and never get beyond this; some shoot out into branches, like seaweed; some puff themselves out into puff-balls; some thrust their heads into mitres;[27] these assume the shape of a cup,[28] and those of a wine-funnel;[29] some, like _A. mammosus_, have a teat; others, like the _A. clypeolarius_, are umbonated at their centre; these are stilted upon a high leg,[30] and those have not a leg to stand on; some are shell-shaped, many bell-shaped, and some hang upon their stalks like a lawyer’s wig;[31] some assume the form of the horse’s hoof, others of a goat’s beard: in _Clathrus cancellatus_ you look into the fungus through a thick red trellis which surrounds it. Some exhibit a nest in which they rear their young,[32] and, not to speak of those vague shapes, “If shapes they can be called, that shape have none Determinate,”