Nicholas P. Money is a gentleman of letters, mycologist, and professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of popular science books that celebrate the diversity of the microbial world. His new book, A Is for Amoeba, will be published in August. What larks, Pip.

Sing heavenly Muse . . .

What in them is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support; 
That to the height of this great argument 
I may assert eternal providence, 
And justify the ways of mushrooms to men.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book I, lines 6, 22-26, amended