_Bot. Char._ Gregarious, or growing in rings[153] on the ground; _pileus_ thick, convex, irregular in shape, more or less tuberculated, sometimes lobed;[154] margin not striate, wavy, expanding unequally; _epidermis_ cream-coloured, grey, reddish, or of a dirty nankeen hue, paler towards the circumference, soft to the touch like kid, minutely tomentose, fragile, dry, firmly attached to the flesh; flesh firm, compact; _gills_ watery, white, very numerous, irregular, with many smaller ones (from 5-11, _Vitt._) interposed, lying over each other like the plaits of a frill, adnato-emarginate,[155] the imperfect gills rounded off at their posterior end. _Stem_ white, robust, firm, solid, somewhat irregular in form, generally thickened at the base, constantly so in young specimens, but in older ones, though occasionally bulging, it presents not unfrequently an equal cylinder throughout, and sometimes tapers slightly downwards. The fibres are effused into the pileus, spreading out like a fan through its substance; _smell_ strong, _taste_ agreeable; _spores_ white, elliptical, adhering firmly to the body on which they fall. The dried plant retains much the same form it had when fresh. On tracing this fungus to its origin, (spring is the only time, and the borders of the woodlands the proper place, to look for it,) if we dig up the earth where it grows, this will be found mouldy to a considerable depth beneath the surface, and strongly impregnated with the peculiar odour which the _Prunulus_ exhales; this apparent mouldiness being, in fact, the spawn, amidst the white filaments of which many minute Agarics, in various stages of their development, may be found; some, in the earliest, presenting merely white cones destitute of heads, whilst in others a slight protuberance indicates the future pileus forming or already formed. The pileus is at first almost spherical, and involute in its borders, the gills whitish, very minute, and so thickly set as to press one against the other, each communicating to the membrane that lines the next the impressions of its own fibres, which remain in the form of transverse striæ, and furnish a characteristic to this fungus retained during all its subsequent growth (_Vitt._). The greatest size which I have known the _Prunulus_ attain has been in England, where I have picked specimens measuring six inches across, and weighing between four and five ounces; as to the fecundity of this fungus, I collected this spring, from a single ring on the War-Mount at Keston (Kent), from ten to twelve pounds, and in the one field from twenty to twenty-five pounds. In this neighbourhood they are generally destroyed, as injurious to his grass-crops, by the over-careful farmer, quite ignorant, of course, of their value; to which the following extract from a letter of Professor Balbi to Persoon bears testimony:—“This rare and most delicious Agaric, the _Mouceron_ of Bulliard, and the _Ag. prunulus_ of other