Fungi growing in mines exhibit the same characteristic colors which they display on the surface of the ground. Sometimes, however, species that grow in caves, or in hollow trees, assume the most curious abnormal forms, their metamorphosis remaining incomplete, so that instead of producing fructification the whole fungus becomes a monstrous modification of the mycelium. Their love of seclusion and darkness gives an etiolated, sickly complexion to the whole tribe. In consequence of this habit, they are, as a rule, the most sombre of all plants, although instances occur in which the prevailing neutral tints are exchanged for the most brilliant scarlets and yellows. Green, which is the most frequent of all colors, the household dress of our mother earth, more characteristic of ferns, mosses, lichens, and algæ than of the higher plants, is almost unknown in the fungi; and even when it occurs, it is always more or less of a verdigris tint, and does not appear to be owing to the action of light and oxygen upon the contents of the cell. Another of the remarkable peculiarities of the fungi is the extreme rapidity of their growth, a peculiarity more frequently to be seen among the lowest forms of animal life than among plants. They seem special miracles of nature, rising from the ground, or from the decaying trunk of the tree, full-formed and complete in all their parts in a single night, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, or the armed soldiers from the dragon’s teeth of Cadmus, sown in the furrows of Colchis. It has long been known that the growth of fungi takes place with great rapidity during thundery weather, owing, in all probability, to the nitrogenized products of the rain which then falls. One is surprised after a thunderstorm in the beginning of August, or a day of warm, moist, misty weather, such as often occurs in September, to see in the woods thick clusters of these plants which had sprung into existence in the short space of twenty-four hours, covering almost every decayed stump and rotten tree. In tropical countries, stimulated by the intense heat and light, the rapidity of vegetable growth is truly astonishing; the stout, woody stem of the bamboo-cane, for instance, shooting up in the dense jungles of India at the rate of an inch per hour. In the Polynesian Islands, so favorable to vegetable life are the climate and soil that turnip, radish, and mustard seed when sown show their cotyledon leaves in twenty-four hours; melons, cucumbers, and pumpkins spring up in three days, and peas and beans in four. But swift as is this development of vegetation in highly favorable circumstances, the rapidity of fungoid growth, under ordinary conditions, is still more astonishing. These plants usually form at the rate of twenty thousand new cells every minute. The giant puff-ball (Lycoperdon giganteum), occasionally to be seen in fields and plantations, increases from the size of a pea to that of a melon in a single night; while the common