History of the Fungi of the Rimini Territory

6

-ever plants they are born, whether living oaks or dead poplars, they maintain such properties of the juices, as I myself have experienced, undisturbed. Therefore, constancy flourishes not only in the species, but also in their essential parts.

That also is repugnant to my observations, that trees produce their own peculiar fungi; for besides that the entire family of boleti porcini, coralloidum coral-like fungi, etc., sprouts removed from every tree, the same species of fungus has been gathered by me on elders, on poplars, on elms, and on oaks. So also the same species of agaricus bracket fungus has often been found by me, now on elms and oaks, another time on mulberries and apple trees, not only in one or another species, but in many. What if the reader reads in some grave author that softer fungi [grow] on the roots of trees rather than on the trunk, but harder ones on the branches of trees? What will he answer to the physical reasons by which this doctrine is supported? Let him say that Nature operates differently in the Rimini territory; since we have sometimes gathered not only hard fungi on the roots of trees, but also woody agarici bracket fungi hollowed out by ingenious ends, and on the larger branches of trees, we have found not only harder agarici bracket fungi, but also softer ones and even fungi sweet to eat. I also conceive with difficulty that seeds, which are rendered almost intact through the bowel by some quadrupeds, can produce fungi; for decisive observations are lacking, and in this, many things are granted gratis to fantasies; I, however, judge that such seeds either rot entirely, or if they have not been greatly changed in the cooking, it seems more easily possible that they could unfold themselves into a plant than degenerate into a fungus. Similarly, I do not sufficiently approve of tracing the varieties of colors of fungi from the juices of the plants to which they adhere, rather than from the peculiar intimate structure and configuration of the organs of the fungi; for the same species of fungi, which is found on oaks and elms, on elms and mulberries, on oaks and poplars, etc., everywhere presents the same constant colors, when in that kind of plant a diverse juice, as Chemistry teaches, inhabits. We also recognize that it is too inconsiderately concocted that fungi are nests of insects in nearly the same way as they wish corals, madrepores, and other marine stone-plants to be. For I know many species of fungi, and especially of boleti porcini, that are entirely immune from insects; indeed, there is a fungus by whose exhalation flies perish.

But that fungi arise in various places in which it is difficult to suspect a pre-existing seed, I am not moved. Such are the fungi of Vallisnerius which arose upon a human meninge, and the fungi of Bartolutius in a glass phial of Lychen pratensis meadow lichen half-filled with water mixed [with it], after about seven