Fungi. In the damp weather of autumn the fungus tribe become very numerous, and often are the first phenomena which remind us of the decline of summer and the approach of cooler season, when

Libra dies somni pares ubi fecerit horas.

There is something remarkable about the growth of fungi. Some fungi appear here and there springing up in places where they are least expected, and where they have perhaps never grown before. How do the seeds come in such places? A learned cryptogamist once said, he thought their semina floated in the air, and were carried up into the clouds, and wafted along with them, and deposited by fogs on the earth’s surface. Is there any particular aspect or side of trees more obnoxious to the growth of parasitical fungi than others?

Thomas Furly Forster, The Pocket Encyclopaedia of Natural Phenomena, published 1827