DIMENSIONS.

Most funguses do not present great anomalies in their size, but retain nearly the same dimensions throughout the whole course of their being; some few species, however, seem to have a faculty of almost indefinite expansion. The usual size of a puff-ball, as we all know, is not much larger than an egg, but some puff-balls attain to the dimensions of the human head,[45] or exceed it. Mr. Berkeley quotes the case of a Polyporus squamosus, which in three weeks grew to seven feet five inches in periphery, and weighed thirty-four pounds; also of a Polyporus fraxineus, which in a few years measured forty-two inches across. Clusius[46] tells us of a fungus in Pannonia, of such immense size, that after satisfying the cravings of a large mycophilous household, enough of it remained to fill a chariot; this must have been the Polyporus frondosus, to which Polyporus John Bapt. Porta[47] also alludes as that called gallinace[48] by the Neapolitans, which is so big, he says, that you can scarcely make your hands meet round it, “brachiis diductis vix homo complecti possit;” he had known it attain twelve pounds weight in a few days.[49] Bolton, in 1787, found an Agaricus muscarius, which, “after the removal of a considerable portion of its stalk, weighed nearly two pounds;” Withering, an A. Georgii, “which weighed fourteen pounds,” and Mr. Stackhouse another of the same species in Cornwall, “which was eighteen inches across, and had a stem as thick as a man’s wrist;” and I lately picked in the park at Buckhurst, a Boletus edulis which measured twenty-eight inches round its pileus, and eight round the stem, and a few days later a B. pachypus, the girth of which was thirty-two inches.