Debbie Cayse, age 14, of Sarasota, Florida, for her question:
What in the world is a devil's snuffbox?
Most young space agers, naturally, refuse to believe that our wondrous world is populated by devils large or small. They sensibly assume that tantalizing little problems usually spring from human blunders. Our toughest tormenting problems merely tempt us to find remedies.
Dark powdery snuff acts on the sensitive nerves inside the nose to trigger a monstrous sneeze. A dandy of the past often carried a dainty little snuffbox in the pocket of his embroidered weskit. Now and then he poked a sniff of snuff up his nose, unfolded his elegant hanky and waited for the resounding hatcht~hatchhatchoo. Maybe it did and maybe it did not clear the sinus passages in his head. But it certainly proved that powdery snuff was a sneeze maker. It is not, of course, the only sneezy powder in the world. Dust and pollen and a long list of other small foreign bodies floating in the air also tend to make people sneeze.
We all know that hay fever and its related allergies arrive with the pollen season of the plant world. Most of these airborne particles are too small for our eyes to see. But certain plants pour forth spores or pollen in thick clouds and merely the sight of them makes us want to sneeze. One of these is the puffball. This pasty pale plant is the giant of the fungus family. It grows on the ground like a round stone and may reach the size of a two foot boulder. Most of the time it squats there unnoticed. But at certain fikasons it acts like a spilled snuffbox.
Nature, of course, decrees that the puffball must hand on life to a new generation. when this time comes, it begins to create countless cumbers of tiny dark spores within itself. As they ripen, the minuscule spores become dirty brown or olive green, murky yellow or purple. They are no bigger than grains of fine, dusty powder and we need to see a whole host of them to detect their color.
At last the puffball spores are ready to take their chances in the world. The parent plant launches them, puff after puff. The dusty spores are light enough to float and they fill the surrounding air with dark, powdery clouds. The sight is enough to make you want to sneeze. This is how the puffball got its nickname in bygone days. It seemed natural to call this teasy sneezy creation of the plant world
Another factor made the nickname seem even more sensible. A puffball tends to get stepped on or kicked by accident. If this happens when the spores are just ready for their freedom, a careless kick may cause them to explode in a dusty cloud. The smoky dust may tickle your nose and it has about 7,000 billion p powdery spores all willing to try to provoke a sniffy snuffy hatchoo.
The dusty spores are soon separated by the breezes and wafted afar. One lucky speck in a trillion will land at last in a shady nook where the moist soil is rich with decaying vegetation. It will grow an underground network of matted fibers called mycelium. This is the real puffball plant. The pasty puffball that sprouts above the ground is the plant's fruiting body. It grows when time comes to form and launch new spores. When this is done, the fruiting body withers and the plant continues its underground existence until the next snuffbox season rolls around.