HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



217 



HOW TO DISCEIMINATE BETWEEN EDIBLE AND 



POISONOUS FUNGI. 



By C. B. PLOWRIGHT. 



'D^^3 HE glorious au- 

 tumn is fast 

 approaching, 

 with its loaded 

 orchards, its 

 ■well-filled 

 barns, its cool, 

 refreshing days, 

 and its rich, mellow twilights. 

 What a change from the over- 

 powering sultriness and dust of 

 July and August ! With au- 

 tumn comes the great mass of 

 mushrooms and toadstools, — 

 good, bad, and indifferent ; of 

 all colours, shapes, and sizes; 

 which, to the oi 77-0W01, repre- 

 sent the whole mycologic king- 

 dom. Our country, as being 

 highly favoured for the fungo- 

 logist, has long been known ; but, during the last 

 few years, many and rich additions have been made 

 to its flora, especially by Scotch botanists. Por 

 some considerable time past, attempts have been 

 made to introduce and popularize the Continental 

 fungus-eating customs; but, up to the present, 

 these attempts have not been crowned with any 

 special degree of success. In spite of our precon- 

 ceived notions of Prench cooks and Parisian cuisine, 

 it must be admitted much comes to table, and is 

 eaten with considerable gusto abroad, that our less 

 highly educated tastes reject as unpalatable. This 

 is equally true of fungus-eating. A friend of ours, 

 a keen naturalist, frequently resides for some 

 months in the year in the South of France, and 

 although he enjoys Prench fare as well as most 

 people, he speaks of the cooked fungi as being insipid 

 to a degree. The method of procedure with these 

 articles of diet seems to be that the fresh fungi, 

 when gathered, are cut into small pieces and dried 

 No. 142. 



in the sun, and are preserved for winter use. Before 

 being cooked, they undergo a series of continued 

 washings in water, until literally all the remaining 

 flavour is washed out of them. By this process it 

 is extremely probable many species are rendered 

 not only innoxious, but perfectly wholesome, which 

 would otherwise produce most serious, if not fatal 

 symptoms ; and from being useless waste products, 

 become material for the formation of unexceptional 

 protoplasm. Many analyses of fungi have been 

 published, but a real knowledge of their chemistry 

 remains a desideratum : their ultimate composition 

 has been more or less worked at ; but our knowledge 

 of their proximate constituents is very meagre. 

 We learn from Dr. Badham, that in Rome the com- 

 mon mushroom is classed with poisonous fungi, and 

 not allowed to be sold in the public market. It is 

 highly improbable this would have been the case 

 without there being some good and substantial 

 reason for it, for Italy is a country where numerous 

 species of fungi are largely consumed, and no fear 

 of these plants as a class exists. It would seem as 

 if there were something special in the climate of the 

 districts from which the Roman market is supplied 

 that renders the mushrooms grown in it poisonous. 

 We know how powerful is the influence of surround- 

 ing circumstances upon flowering plants. For 

 example, the exclusion of light from potato tubers 

 or celery plants considerably modifies their proper- 

 ties. Every now and then we hear of people being 

 poisoned (not necessarily fatally) in this country by 

 eating mushrooms, and, when this happens, it is 

 almost always attributed to the wrong kind having 

 been gathered, and not to the nature of the plant 

 being modified by special circumstances. Upon 

 more than one occasion such cases have come under 

 my notice personally, in which people who knew 

 what was a mushroom and what was not, have been 

 made seriously ill by their repast. What the pre- 

 cise difference in the composition of the plant is, 



