Monograph of the Truffles

different places, so that, if the necessary elements are found, they may further evolve; otherwise, they perish.

De Borch (22) saw the seeds of Tuber magnatum germinating, which he obtained and sowed artificially from the maternal rind (peridium). Verrucose, black truffles have been cultivated and multiplied for many years now through fragments of the rind. This has been proven by farmers, who call decaying truffles the "truffle matrix," which at a certain time will yield new truffles. Handling this matrix ourselves, we have also found the germs of the summer truffle, barely exceeding the size of a millet grain, many times over. These germs, being very numerous, are compressed by the restriction of space and usually abort.

Turpin (23), thinking very singularly about the formation of vegetable tissue, calls the reproductive bodies of truffles (sporidia) "bulbils," which arise from a peculiar metamorphosis of granules nesting in the utricles of the cellular fabric of the truffle, and serve the reproduction of the species. He deduced this from a very curious, yet not very successful, experiment with the Ornithogalum thyrsoides (24); for the bulbils that attach to the leaf of the Ornithogalum are not to be attributed to the granules of the parenchyma, but rather to the exuded coagulable lymph, which is here and there shaped into so many little buds. In such a way, the buds, bulbils, roots, tubers, etc., of plants that multiply their species are formed.

Although it may appear from what has been exposed that the propagation of truffles is carried out according to the norm of other vegetables, there have not been wanting those who, denying reproduction to all fungi and thus to truffles, explained their reproduction in another way by means of corpuscles.

Bornholz (25) considers the sporidia of truffles to be so many glands of uncertain use (26), and asserts that their reproduction is effected by the conglomeration of various elements of the earth. Since, however, the presence of a living truffle is necessary everywhere—even in suitably prepared humus—for its propagation, he says that the humus merely imparts a generative faculty, not seeds. This is also evident, he adds, in the formation of inorganic bodies; he brings forward as an example the saturated solution of any salt, in which crystallization is promoted by an infused crystal. To which hypothesis...