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


The very churches whose domes rise to the northward of the ancient remains are built of looted stones and look like parasitic and fungoid growths, and the tourists stream through those spaces day by day, stare at the marble fragments, the arches, the fallen carvings and rich capitals, with nothing greater in their minds and nothing clearer....

One morning, my host came to me and said: "I should like to show you a curious thing. We have just discovered a cellar here that seems never to have been visited or used since the house was built, and there is the strangest fungoid growth in it I have ever seen." He took a big bunch of keys, rang the bell, gave an order for lights to be brought, and we went together to the place.

If odour, as we understand it, is the dog's only guide, how does he manage to follow that guide amidst all these totally different odours? Is he warned of the contents of the subsoil by a general emanation, by that fungoid effluvium common to all the species? Thus a somewhat embarrassing question arises.

A stained, bleared-eyed, knocked-kneed sinner of a room. And oh! the scullery, where the shining sink had grown a gray, rough skin, a sort of fungoid coat, from the grease that clung to it, and the gas stove, furred with rust, skulked like some obscene monster in its corner. He was afraid, morally and physically afraid, to look at that thing of infamy behind the back door.

I may here mention that during my captivity I hardly learned to distinguish the women from the men, they differed so little. Often I wondered whether I had not come upon a sort of fungoid people, with just enough mind to give them motion and the expressions of anger and greed.

It was a kind of glade in the forest, made by a fall; seedlings were already starting up to struggle for the vacant space; and beyond, the dense growth of stems and twining vines and splashes of fungus and flowers closed in again. Before me, squatting together upon the fungoid ruins of a huge fallen tree and still unaware of my approach, were three grotesque human figures.

Later came difficulties; after successive dry summers the asparagus was attacked by a fungoid complaint, called by the growers "rust."

Probably from Holland or Denmark. Possibly from some point nearer the center of Europe. A study of the terrible disease which so often attacks the potato crop in this country will serve, I think, to bring forcibly before you certain untoward conditions which may be called climatic, and which are attributable to fungoid spores in the air.

It seemed almost as though they had not traced us up the crack after all, in spite of the tell-tale heap of broken fungi that must have lain beneath it. At times the cleft narrowed so much that we could scarce squeeze up it; at others it expanded into great drusy cavities, studded with prickly crystals or thickly beset with dull, shining fungoid pimples.

M. Bechamp has applied Mitscherlich's observation, concerning the soluble fermentative part of yeast, to fungoid growths, and has made the interesting discovery that fungoid growths, like yeast, yield to water a substance that inverts sugar. When the production of fungoid growths is prevented by means of an antiseptic, the inversion of sugar does not take place.