Phallus duplicatus.

Natural size, showing veil.]

Volva egg-shaped, thick, whitish, frequently having a pinkish tinge.

The stem is cylindrical, cellulose, tapering upward. The veil is
reticulate, frequently surrounding the whole of the stem from the pileus
to the volva, often torn. The pileus is pitted, deliquescent, six to
eight inches high, apex acute. Spores elliptic-oblong.

I am sure I never saw finer lace-work than I have seen on this plant. A
few years ago one of these plants insisted upon growing near my house,
where a fence post had formerly been, with the effect of almost driving
the family from home. One can hardly imagine so beautiful a plant giving
off such an odor. It is not a common plant in our state.

_Phallus Ravenelii. B. & C._

[Illustration: Figure 447.--Phallus Ravenelii. Natural size, showing
volva at base, receptacle and cap.]

This plant is extremely abundant about Chillicothe. I have seen hundreds
of fully developed plants on a few square yards of old sawdust; and one
might easily think that all the bad smells in the world had been turned
loose at that place. The eggs in the sawdust can be gathered by the
bushel. In Figure 449 is represented a cluster, of these eggs. The
section of an egg in the center of the cluster shows the outline of the
volva, the pileus, and the embryo stem. Inside of the volva, in the
middle, is the short undeveloped stem; covering the upper part and sides
of the stem is the pileus; the fruit-bearing part, which is divided into
small chambers, lies on the outside of the pileus. The spores are borne
on club-shaped basidia as shown in Figure 448, within the chamber of the
fruit-bearing part, and when the spores mature, the stem begins to
elongate and force the gleba and pileus through the volva, leaving it at
the base of the stem, as will be seen in Figure 448. The large egg on
the left in the background of Figure 449 is nearly ready to break the
volva. I brought in a large egg one evening and placed it on the mantle.
Later in the evening, the room being warm, while we were reading my wife
noticed this egg beginning to move and it developed in a few minutes to
the shape you see in Figure 447. The development was so rapid that the
motion was very perceptible. The pileus is conical in shape, and after
the disappearance of the gleba the surface of the pileus is merely
granular. The plants are four to six inches high. The stem is hollow and
tapers from the middle to