"The size indeed, the circumscribed form, the capillitiums conjoined into a single body--indue this (form) with an appearance peculiar to a degree; however, should anyone prefer to call it a very remarkable variety of the preceding (_S. fasciculata_), we shall not strenuously refuse. At first glance it looks like a tubulina. After the fashion of its kind, the beginning is soft and milky. The diameter generally an inch and a half to two inches, the height four to six lines; the form perfectly round, or more rarely somewhat oblong. The hypothallus, stout, pellucid silvery, betimes iridescent, when turned to the light, easily separable from the substratum, bears the columellae, dusky, thin, hair-like, aggregate and yet entirely free, and everywhere circinately convergent, depressed by the superimposed burden, hence decumbent: ... the capillitium loosely interwoven, coalesces to a common mass whose smooth and shining surface shows above, regularly disposed minute papillae, the apices of individual sporangia. "Far from infrequent, on decorticate pine, of _Lycogala atrum_ a constant companion"! It goes of course without saying, that for the authors quoted, _Lycogala atrum_ is _Amaurochaete atra_ Rost. _A. fuliginosa_ (Sow.) of more recent students, described and perfectly figured in the volume cited. It is surprising that they did not enter the present species also as a lycogala. But the stemonitis relationship this time impressed them rather than the aethalial; besides they were misled by the _S. fasciculata_ of Gmelin and Persoon, a composite which the genius of Fries hardly availed to disentangle twenty-five years later. The last named author, as we see, wrote first _Lachnobolus_, then _Reticularia_. He calls the interwoven capillitium--_lachne_, wool, a "_pilam tactu eximie elasticam_," etc. He read the description in the _Conspectus_, but carried away the stemonitis suggestion dominant there, as we have seen, put _S. tubulina_ A. & S. as an undeveloped phase of _S. fusca_, which, of course, it is not. It needed not the authority of Rostafinski, _Mon._, p. 197, to assure us this. The earlier authors describe the species in course of development to complete maturity, and clinch the story by declaring the form a constant companion of the commonly recognized amaurochete, so fixing the relationship for us by habitat also. These men made a mistake, of course, in placing their species among the stemonites at all. They did much better however than Fries who called it a reticularia. It was also a mistake to cite _S. fasciculata_,--the small fasciculate tufts of _S. fusca_ and _S. axifera_ offering by the aggregate habit only faint resemblance,--a possible refuge for those who would prefer another disposition of their species distinct (_aliena_) though it is.