ir; he needs
the discreet retirement of his crypt. When he fails to find his food
by burrowing under ground, he comes up to look for it on the surface.
Meeting with a morsel to his taste, he takes it home when its size
permits; if not, he leaves it on the threshold of his burrow and gnaws
at it from below, without reappearing outside. Up to the present,
hydnocistes, truffles and rhizopoga are the only food that I have
known him to eat. These three instances tell us at any rate that the
Bolboceras is not a specialist like the Oxyporus and the Triplax; he is
able to vary his diet; perhaps he feeds on all the underground mushrooms
indiscriminately.

The moth enlarges her domain yet further. Her caterpillar is a grub five
or six millimeters long, white, with a black shiny head. Colonies of it
abound in most mushrooms. It attacks by preference the top of the stem,
for epicurean reasons that escape me; thence it spreads throughout the
cap. It is the habitual boarder of the boletes, agarics, lactarii and
russulie. Apart from certain species and certain groups, everything
suits it. This puny grub, which will spin itself an infinitesimal
cocoon of white silk under the piece attacked and will later become an
insignificant moth, is the primordial ravager.

Let us next mention the arion, that voracious mollusk who also tackles
most mushrooms of some size. He digs himself spacious niches inside
them and there sits blissfully eating. Few in numbers, compared with the
other devourers, he usually sets up house alone. He has, by way of a set
of jaws, a powerful plane which creates great breaches in the object of
his depredations. It is he whose havoc is most apparent.

Now all these gnawers can be recognized by their leavings, such as
crumbs and worm holes. They dig clean passages, they slash and crumble
without a slimy trail, they are the pinkers. The others, the liquefiers,
are the chemists; they dissolve their food by means of reagents. All are
the grubs of flies and belong to the commonalty of the Muscidae. Many
are their species. To distinguish them from one another by rearing them
in order to obtain the perfect stage would involve a great expenditure
of time to little profit. We will describe them by the general name of
maggots.

To see them at work, I select, as the field of exploitation, the satanic
bolete (Boletus Satanas, LENZ.), one of the largest mushrooms that I can
gather in my neighborhood. It has a dirty-white cap; t