his "joyous spouse." But life, with its "pardlike spirit, beautiful and swift," has reached its highest conceptions in the mind of the poet, not in the speculations of the scientist. What a "mingled yarn," spun from many-colored yet invisible threads, is it in the creative mind of a Shakespeare, and how it looms up into "a dome of many-colored glass, staining the white radiance of eternity," under the magic touch of a Shelley! And yet how is it dwarfed down to a contemptible piece of "molecular machinery" by the scientist--one so utterly contemptible in its manifestations that it is ordered to take "a back seat" in this universe of all-potential matter and motion! Dr. Cooke, in his "Handbook of British Fungi," virtually concedes that the spores of the large puff-ball (_Lycoperdon giganteum_), as well as those of mushrooms, truffles, and other edible fungi (those with whose methods of propagation man is best acquainted), may be produced artificially. But the process by which their production is thus effected, is more properly a natural than an artificial one. In speaking of truffle-grounds, he says (quoting from Broome) "that whenever a plantation of beech, or beech and fir, is made in the chalky districts of Salisbury Plain, after the lapse of a few years truffles are produced, and that the plantations continue productive for a period of from ten to fifteen years, after which they cease to be so." No truffle spores were planted in these cases, but the conditions of the soil, interlaced by the roots and shaded by the branches of the young beech trees, or the beech and fir, became favorable for the development of truffle "germs," and they made their appearance just as mushrooms do in caves and other places, where artificial beds are made and chemically balanced for their development and growth. And the reason why they disappeared, after a period of ten or fifteen years, was simply because the proper nutriment of the soil was exhausted, and not in consequence of its being too deeply shaded by the growing trees. One uniform rule would seem to govern in the culture of this much-coveted fungus. Wherever the necessary environing conditions obtain, they _appear_, and wherever these conditions fail, they _disappear_, notwithstanding the most persistent efforts to save them by watering the soil with fresh infusions of the plant. In proof of this, one form of truffle (_Tuber æstivum_) appears under beech trees, another form (_Tuber macrosporum_) under oak trees, and still a third form (_Tuber brumale_) under oaks and white poplars; showing that so slight a change in soil conditions as that resulting from the presence of poplars among oaks, produces a very material change in the character of the fungus--one amounting to a specific difference in variety.