These instructive investigations offer an intelligible explanation of the growth of that well-known subterranean fungus, the truffle (_Tuber cibarium_), the microscopic appearances of a section of which formed the subject of a paper I contributed to “The Popular Science Review” some years ago (1862). The fungus, as will be seen by the fine section cut through a truffle, Fig. 280, consists of flocculent filaments, which in the first instance cover the ground at the fall of the leaf in autumn, under oak or beech trees, the hyphæ of which penetrate the ground, through the humid soil to the _root-hairs_ of the tree. Filaments (mycelia) are again given off which terminate in asci or sacs filled with minute spores of about 1/2500th of an inch in size, while the interspaces are filled up by mycelia, that become consolidated into a firm nut-like body. What happens, then, is this: Trees and plants with normal roots and root-hairs, when growing in ordinary soil, can adapt their roots to life in a soil heavily charged with humus only by contracting symbiotic association with the fungus and paying the tax demanded by the latter in return for its supplies and services. If this adaptation is impossible, and no other suitable variation is evolved, such trees cannot grow in such soils. The physiological relations of the root to the fungus must be different in details in the case of non-green, purely saprophytic, plants, Neottia, Monotropa, &c., and in that of green plants like Erica, Fagus, and Pinus. It is, however, a well-known fact that ordinary green plants cannot utilize vegetable débris directly, and forest trees do so in appearance only, for the fungi, yeasts and bacteria there are actively decomposing the leaves and other remains. A class of pseudo-symbiotic organisms are, however, being brought into the foreground, where the combined action of two symbionts results in the death of or injury to a third plant, each symbiont alone proving harmless. Some time ago Vuillemin showed that a disease in olives results from the invasion of a bacillus (_B. oleæ_), which can, however, only obtain its way into the tissues through the passages driven by the hyphæ of a fungus (Chætophoma). The resulting injury is a sort of burr. This observer also observed the same bacillus and fungus in the canker burrs of the ash. Among many similar cases well worth further attention are the invasion of potato-tubers by bacteria, these making their way down the decaying hyphæ of pioneer fungi. Professor Marshall Ward has seen tomatoes infected by similar means, and other facts show that many bacteria which quicken the rotting of wood are thus led into the tissues by fungi.