United States or Tajikistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The Hall, with its grey facade and parapet, was the only residence of its sort so near the centre of the town. It had, in the first place, the characteristics of a country mansion birds' nests in its chimneys, damp nooks where fungi grew and irregularities of surface direct from Nature's trowel. At night the forms of passengers were patterned by the lamps in black shadows upon the pale walls.

The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around above all, in the long-undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn.

Dead boughs were scattered about like ichthyosauri in a museum, and beyond them were perishing woodbine stems resembling old ropes. From the other window all she could see were more trees, jacketed with lichen and stockinged with moss. At their roots were stemless yellow fungi like lemons and apricots, and tall fungi with more stem than stool.

Its gloom concerned me little I had grown familiar with its unsightly things, its crawling spiders, its strange uncouth beetles, the clusters of blue fungi on its damp walls. The scurrying noises made by bats and owls, who, scared by the lighted candles, were hiding themselves in holes and corners of refuge, startled me not at all I was well accustomed to such sounds.

These minute bodies are termed Spermatia, and I shall say no more about them after remarking that they are quite barren, and that similar sterile bodies are known to occur in very many of the fungi belonging to this and other groups.

We should have to go back to Babylon and the days of King Nebuchadnezzar. How give an idea of the libations poured out to Gad and the shekels laid aside for Meni in the Quicksands Temple? Honora privately thought that building ugly, and it reminded her of a collection of huge yellow fungi sprawling over the ground. A few of the inevitable tortured cedars were around it.

Sometimes a shaft of sunlight shoots into the water, making it glow with color. Fungi in fantastic shapes are plentiful. Growing from the side of a stump, the stem of the fawn-colored pluteus bends upwards to the light. Golden clavarias cover fallen trunks with coral masses and creamy ones are so delicately fragile that you almost fear to touch them lest you mar their beauty.

Here also were vast gelatinous and transparent masses, from which oozed out a yellow-tinted liquid, of so venomous a character that a drop falling on the skin raised a blister. Other fungi were of dazzling whiteness, which Lejoillie likened to a casket of pearls, supported by an azure stalk.

"Nay, not I; 'twill be the elixir of ambrosia to breathe salt air again, and the stronger and more mist-laden the better to knock out foul exhalations sucked in these nine years from musty walls. 'Twill be sweet to have the wind rap from us the various fungi that comes from sunless chambers.

And although it may be difficult, in some instances, to draw the precise line between certain low mycological forms and the amoeboid and some other primitive manifestations of animal life, yet all vegetable physiologists agree in assigning a purely vegetable origin to all the primary groups of fungi their general cellular character determining their proper place in classification.