In like manner, one is curious to know what was the enormous fungus or mushroom Thoreau describes as meeting on one of his rambles, and which, in turn, incurs his malediction,--the huge thallogen he found and plucked high up on the open side of a dry hill, in the midst of and rising above the thin June grass, its sharply conical parasol in the form of a sugarloaf slightly turned up at the edges, which were rent half an inch for every inch or two. The whole length, he states, was sixteen inches, the cap being six inches long by seven wide, the stem about one inch in diameter and naked, the top of the cap pure white within and without. He marvels how its soft cone ever broke through the earth. It represents to him a vegetable force which may almost make man tremble for his dominion. It carries him back to the era of the formation of the coal measures, the age of the Saurus and the Pliosaurus, when bull-frogs were as big as bulls. What part has it to perform in the economy of the world? It brought before him pictures of parasols of Chinese mandarins; or it might have been used by the great fossil bull-frog in his walks. Returning home with it, he placed it in the cellar to note its decay. Like the mighty, it fell. By night there remained not more than two of the six inches of the height of the cap, and it went on rapidly melting from the edges upward, spreading as it dissolved till it was shaped like a dish-cover and the barrel head beneath it and its own stem looked as if a large bottle of ink had been broken there. It defiled all it touched. Is it not a giant mildew or mould? he inquires. The offspring of a night, it was wasted in a day. One thinks of Coprinus comatus--a colossal specimen of the "shaggy mane"; and doubtless this was the species encountered by the Walden sage, rearing its silver shaft through the thin June grass in his early morning tramp to Pinxter Spring.