Very good eating, though scarcely as highly flavored as the common mushroom. _Peck._ West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, June to frost. _McIlvaine._ A. silvicola, by many authors considered a variety of A. campester, is, seemingly, becoming common. Professor Peck in 46th Rep. has made the abrupt bulb and its usual double veil distinctive marks which ally it to A. arvensis. He therefore calls it var. abruptus. As this book goes to press Professor Peck writes me that he concludes var. abruptus to be a good and distinct species. It is therefore given as such. While familiar with it since 1881, I never found it in quantity until 1898, at Mt. Gretna, Pa. There, among the straw and rubbish of abandoned camps on wood margins, it grew in great quantity; sometimes singly, at others in crowded clusters. When growing singly it exhibits all the characteristics of its description; when clustered, the stems are not always bulbous. The caps are thin but fleshy, brittle and bear a disproportionate width to the stem—like a plate on a pipe stem. The caps when mature are usually tinged with yellow and are spread flat; the ring is large, often double, yellowish, often torn, fragments of it frequently hang from the cap margin; the bulb when perfect is small, abrupt, as if it had once been round but the stem pushed into it. It has a strong spicy mushroom odor and taste, and makes a high-flavored dish. It is delicious with meats. It is the very best mushroom for catsup. Mixed with Russulæ or Lactarii or other species lacking in mushroom flavor, it enriches the entire dish. The stems, excepting of the very young, are tough. Larvæ do not infest A. silvicola. Its habit of growth shows it to be cultivatable. It has but one draw-back. Growing as it does in woods and in the presence of the poisonous Amanita, it is possible for the careless collector to confound the two. The Amanitæ have larger bulbs, cups at the base, and _white gills_; the A. silvicola has no volva, has whitish gills when very young only, they become pinkish, then a marked blackish-brown. =A. creta´ceus= Fr.—_creta_, chalk. =Pileus= 3 in. and more broad, wholly _white_, fleshy, lens-shaped-globose when young, then convexo-flattened, obtuse, dry, _sometimes even_, sometimes rivulose chiefly round the margin from the cuticle _separating into squamules_. =Flesh= thick, white, unchangeable. =Stem= 3 in. long, 3–6 lines and more thick, _hollow, stuffed with a spider-web pith_, firm, attenuated upward, even, smooth, not spotted, white. =Gills= free, then remote, ventricose but _very much narrowed toward the stem_, crowded, _remaining long white_, becoming dingy-brown only when old. _Fries._ =Spores= 3×4µ _W.G.S._; 5–6×3.5µ _Massee_. Under certain conditions the spores are white. _M.J.B._ In lawns and rich ground. North Carolina, on earth and wood. Edible, _Curtis_; Minnesota, rare, _Johnson_; California, _H. and M._; Ohio, _Lloyd_; Kentucky, _Lloyd_, Rep. 4; New York, _Peck_, Rep. 22.