easily known by its comparatively large size,
peculiar, obovate shape, its brilliant color, and unusually persistent
membranous calyculus. It is peculiar to the western part of North
America, South Dakota west to the Pacific Ocean.

South Dakota, Colorado, California, Washington.

In the thin-covered mountains of Colorado, or hidden by the still drier
thickets and woods of Southern California, the fruit of this species is
small, somewhat as the clavate hemitrichia, pure, deep yellow, golden or
vitelline as Phillips says; but at loftier altitudes in the ever cool
forests on the high mountain flanks, beginning away up where the glacier
first starts to crack and slide between the 'cleavers', and forests of
stunted white-stemmed pine or wooly-fruited fir throw down their twigs
and foliage undisturbed through centuries,--on down to where the plowing
ice forgets its thrust, and melts to gentle floods amid spruce and
hemlock-groves,--all the way the beautiful versicolor spreads and
fruits, in August and September in all the richness of color which its
name implies, which Phillips saw, tints of red, and yellow, and olive,
and green, not brilliant, but in all the softer shades the artists love,
weaving, in far-spread strands of tufted cylinders and cones upturned,
fair as flowers, dusky garlands, by sunlight long forgot! Did not the
old-time botanists liken these things once and again, to flowers!

5. ARCYRIA INCARNATA _Persoon._

1786. _Clathrus adnatus_ Batsch, _Elench. Fung._, 141. (?)
1791. _Arcyria incarnata_ Pers., Gmel., _Syst. Nat._, II., 1467.

Sporangia closely crowded, cylindric, 1-1.5 mm. high, rosy or
flesh-colored, stipitate or almost sessile; stipe generally short,
sometimes barely a conical point beneath the calyculus; hypothallus
none; peridium wholly evanescent, except the shallow, saucer-like,
inwardly roughened calyculus; capillitium loose, broad, pale reddish,
attached to the cup at the centre only by strands which enter the hollow
stem, the threads adorned with transverse plates, cogs, ridges, etc.,
arranged in an open spiral; spore-mass rosy, spores by transmitted light
colorless, nearly smooth, 7-8 mu.

This common species is well marked both by its color and by the
delicate attachment of the capillitium to the calyculus. This is so
frail that the slightest breath ofttimes suffices to effect a
separation, and the empty calyculi are not infrequently the only
evidence of the fructification. Thi