Gregarious, stipitate, half an inch to one inch high, and two lines to three
quarters of an inch broad, turbinate, the summit truncate, plane, or
somewhat concave, white, and when young with a pulverulent and uniform
surface, but when mature, smooth, and marked with black dots.
The interior is also white, and o f a spongy substance. The outer sur-
face of the stipes up to the margin of the disk, blackish. Perithecia
immersed in the substance of the disk, ovate, their black orifices somewhat
prominent. Asci linear-clavate, containing eight oblong, opake
sporidia, the whole escaping in the form of a black powder.
A very pretty and striking plant, long known to botanists,
The form is altogether that of a Peziza, but its structure bespeaks
it to belong unequivocally to the Sphæria tribe. If
plus ultra had been the motto for the cryptogamie part of
WiTHERiNG’s “ Arrangement,” we should hardly, in the last
edition, have looked for this plant in the genus Peziza.
Fig. 1. H . punctatum, natural size. Fig. 2. Ditto, mature. Fig. 3. A section,
natural size. Fig. 4. A section. Fig. 5. Perithecium. Fig. 6. Asci
•and sporidia ; magnified.