 Due partly to their ready availability and the ease with which they may be grown in the laboratory , C. micaceus and other coprinoid mushrooms were common subjects in cytological studies of the 19th and 20th centuries . The German botanist Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link reported his observations of the structure of the hymenium ( the fertile spore @-@ bearing surface ) in 1809 , but misinterpreted what he had seen . Link thought that microscopic structures known today as basidia were thecae , comparable in form to the asci of the Ascomycetes , and that each theca contained four series of spores . His inaccurate drawings of the hymenium of C. micaceus were copied in subsequent mycological publications by other authors , and it was not until microscopy had advanced that mycologists were able to determine the true nature of the basidia , when nearly three decades later in 1837 Joseph @-@ Henri Léveillé and August Corda independently published correct descriptions of the structure of the hymenium . In 1924 , A. H. Reginald Buller published a comprehensive description and analysis of the processes of spore production and release in the third volume of his Researches on Fungi . 
