may with some confidence suggest, that any one, who is so circumstanced as to afford the time, so situated as to find a supply of these productions, and will bestow on them a patient examination, will find both pleasure and gratification in contemplating the beauty, the mechanism, the forms, the attitudes, of the whole order of fungi. As far as we can observe, it appears to be an established ordinance of nature, that all created things must have a final period. This mandate is effected by various means, slow and nearly imperceptible in some cases, but operative in all. As in the animal world, after disease or violence has extinguished life, the dispersion is accomplished by the agency principally of other animals, or animated creatures; so, in the vegetable world, vegetating substances usually effect the entire decomposition: for though, in the larger kinds, the high and lofty ones of the forest, insects are often the primary agents, yet other minute substances are commonly found to accelerate or complete the dissolution. Fungi in general, particularly those arranged as sphæria, trichia, peziza, and boletus, appear as the principal and most numerous agents, and we find them almost universally on substances in a certain state of decay, or approximation to it; though there are a few genera of this class which are attached to, and flourish on, living vegetation. The primary decline is possibly occasioned by putrescence of the sap, or defective circulation, and this unhealthy state of the plant affording the suitable soil for the germination of the parasitic fungus; for there must be an original though inert seed, till these circumstances vivify its principle. By what means the parasite finishes the dissolution is not quite obvious; but of that insidious race the byssi, of which family is the dry-rot (byssus septica), the radicals penetrate like the finest hairs into the substance, and thus destroy the cohesion of the fibres. So do the nidulariæ, many of the agarics, the boleti, and others; and it is not unlikely that this operation is the general principle of action of the whole race, though not so obvious in the minuter kinds. These terminators, many of which present but little character to the naked eye, under the microscope we find to be of various forms, though not always so distinguishable from each other as the flowers of our garden. Some of the genera of plants appear to have distinct agents assigned to them, and the detection and enumeration of them have been carried to considerable extent by some of the foreign naturalists; but, to point out the variety and curious organization of these substances, we will only instance four, to be found on the common plants of the garden or the copse: the laurel, the elm, the sycamore, and the beech.