Note 45 — DIMENSIONS.

Hence it was called κρανίον (vide Theoph. Lib. vol. i. cap. 9) by the ancients. Cesalpinus describes it under the name of Peziza, and reports that it is common in the woods of Pisa, whence men gather to eat them. We read also, in an ancient Italian writer (Cicinelli), that the environs of Padua produce enormous puff-balls, of which one (unless this author was given to puffing) measured not less than two feet across, in one direction, being upwards of a foot and a half in its least diameter. It was big enough, he says, to have written on its rind the celebrated inscription attributed by Dion Cassius to the Dacians, which they presented to the Emperor, “in quo scriptum erat Latinis literis Burros sociosque omnes eum hortari ut domum reverteretur pacemque coleret.” Other authors also (Alph. de Tuberibus,—not truffles, but puff-balls,—cap. xvii.; Imperato, Hist. Nat. Hol. vol. xxvii. cap. 5) speak of puff-balls of sixty and one hundred pounds weight.