70 MUSEUM Jupiter was enthroned, whence they visited Helicon to bathe in Hippocrene, and celebrate their choral dances around the altar on the top of the mountain. K. O. Mtiller infers, from the fact that the worship of the muses originally flourished on the same mountain which was represented as the common abode of the gods, that it was the poets of that region, the ancient Pierian minstrels, whose imagination created and arranged the Olympian council. Elsewhere they were chiefly honored as the nymphs of fountains. They were commonly esteemed the daughters of Jupiter and Mnemosyne, but were also called daughters of Coelus and Terra (Uranus and Ge), of Pierus and a Pimpleian nymph, of Jupiter and either Plusia, Moneta, or Minerva, of Apollo and Plusia, and of ^Ether and Terra. Their number was variously given at first as either three, four, or seven, but was at length established and recognized as nine throughout Greece. Hesiod first states the names of all the nine, by which they are usu- ally designated: Olio, the muse of history; Euterpe, of lyric poetry ; Thalia, of comedy ; Melpomene, of tragedy ; Terpsichore, of choral dance and song ; Erato, of erotic poetry ; Po- lyhymnia, of the sublime hymn; Urania, of astronomy ; and Calliope, of epic poetry. In Homer as in later authors they sing festive songs at the banquets of the gods, and are in- voked by mortal poets to bring before the mind the events which they have to relate, and to confer the gift of poetry. They punished Thamyris, who had presumed to excel them, with blindness ; stripped the sirens, who had ventured on a contest with them, of their wings ; and metamorphosed the nine daughters of Pierus, who sought to rival them, into birds. Though usually regarded as virgin divinities, the greatest mythical bards, such as Linus and Orpheus, were called their sons. Apollo, as the god of the lyre, led their choir, and they themselves had the gift of prophecy. They were worshipped with libations of water or milk and honey, received various designa- tions from the poets according to the places that were sacred to them, and were represented each with particular attributes in works of art. MUSEUM (Gr. povaelov, a temple of the muses), a repository of objects relating to history, science, or the arts. In the modern sense of the term the temples of Apollo at Delphi and Juno at Samos, and the acropolis at Athens, as receptacles of works of art, were muse- ums. In history the name was first applied to the academy founded by Ptolemy Philadel- phus at Alexandria. Cosmo the Elder be- gan the first of the now celebrated galleries of Florence, and to him is due the conception of the museum in its modern signification. Pope Julius II. founded the museum of the Vatican. During the 16th and 17th centuries the museum mania led to the stripping of the Erovinces of works of art, which were col- >cted in the capitals ; and thus were begun the great museums and galleries in nearly all the MUSHROOM leading cities on the continent. Besides paint- ino-s and statuary, many of the museums com- prise collections of bronzes, medals, gems, cameos, and intaglios. The Ashmolean museum in Oxford, founded about 1680, is the oldest in England ; and the British museum in London, established in 1753, is the most important in the world. In some of the European cities there are special repositories, like the Thor- waldsen museum in Copenhagen and that in Paris established by Plon in the Louvre in 1875. The celebrated collections are described in this Cyclopaedia under the names of the cities in which they are situated ; and the more promi- nent, such as the British museum, the Louvre, and the Vatican, are particularly described under their own titles. There are also special museums of palseontological, anatomical, zo- ological, geological, and mineralogical collec- tions, which are mentioned in connection with the places or institutions in which they are situated, or with which they are connected. MTSHROOM (Fr. mousseron, from mousse, moss, because mushrooms are often found grow- ing in it), the name of several edible fungi, chiefly of the genus agaricus. The genus is large, and contains the most highly organized forms found among fungi ; the number of spe- cies known to be edible is few; untested ag- arics, and those known to be poisonous, to- gether with other fungi of similar appear- ance, are popularly called toadstools. The ag- arics have an abundant mycelium, known to gardeners as the spawn, consisting of white, cottony filaments, which spread in every direc- tion through the soil; this, which is the ve- getative portion of the plant, grows quite out of sight. That which is .popularly recog- nized as the mushroom corresponds to the in- florescence in other plants ; this appears upon the mycelium as a small knob, and soon pushes its way to the surface, where it is at first nearly spherical, but it rapidly develops and shows its various parts. There is a stem, bear- ing at its top an expanded, umbrella-shaped portion, the pileus or cap. In the button state, the covering or skin of the cap (volva) is at- tached to the stem, but as the cap expands this breaks away, leaving a fragment upon the stem, known as the ring or annulus. Upon the under side of the cap are numerous thin vertical plates, radiating from the stem, but not attached to it ; these are the hymenium, popularly called the gills ; a thin transverse section of one of these plates, when highly magnified, shows its surface to be studded with large cells terminating in four points, each of which bears a spore. The different species of agaricus present great variety in the form and size of the cap, and the color and character of its surface ; the gills and the spores vary in color, which serves to divide the genus into groups according as they are white, pink, rust color, purplish brown, or black. Mushrooms grow wild in Europe and America, and a majority of the edible spe-
