Funguses have a remarkable power of re-forming such parts of their substance as have been accidentally or otherwise removed. Vittadini found that when the tubes of a _Boletus_ were cut out from a growing plant, they were after a time reproduced. Where deep holes have been eaten into these plants by snails, such holes, on the _Boletus_ attaining to its full growth, are partially refilled. If the tender _Polyporus_ be cut across, the wound immediately sets about healing by the first intention, leaving not even a cicatrice to mark the original seat of the injury. The _Lycoperdons_ (_Bovista_), which are often accidentally wounded by the scythe, have the same faculty of repairing the injury, remodelling afresh the parts that may have been excised from them.[39] MOTION. In a recent work on ‘Insect Life,’ I have discoursed somewhat at large on the insufficiency of any kind of movements as proofs of sensation, quoting, amidst other evidences to this effect, certain remarkable movements in plants. Some of the present family exhibit the phenomena of insensitive motion in a remarkable manner, and might have been added to the list already cited in that publication. Mr. Robson has given us a very interesting account of the movements he observed in the scarlet _Clathrus_, which is here transcribed in his own words. It is interesting to notice how an unbiassed observer uses the very terms to designate the movements of a plant which would have been minutely descriptive of those of an insect:—“At first I was much surprised to see a part of the fibres, that had got through a rupture in the top of the _Clathrus_, moving like the legs of a fly when laid on his back. I then touched it with the point of a pin, and was still more surprised when I saw it present the appearance of a little bundle of worms entangled together, the fibres being all alive. I next took the little bundle of fibres quite out, and the animal motion was then so strong as to turn the head halfway round, first one way and then another, and two or three times it got out of the focus. Almost every fibre had a different motion; some of them twined round one another, and then untwined again, whilst others were bending, extending, coiling, waving, etc. The fibres had many little balls adhering to their sides, which I take to be the seeds, and I observed many of them to be disengaged at every motion of the fibres; the seeds appeared like gunpowder finely granulated.” Instances from other authors abound. “An _Helvella inflata_, on being touched by me once, threw up its seeds in the form of a smoke, which arose with an elastic bound, glittering in the sunshine like particles of silver.”[40] “The _Vibrissea truncorum_, taken from water and exposed to the rays of the sun, though at first smooth, is soon covered with white geniculated filaments, which start from the _hymenium_, and have an oscillating motion.”[41] The _Pilobolus_, of which so accurate an account has been given us by the