500 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
spores when shaken, or squeezed, and when the chamber in 
which the spores are developed has been thus burst open. This 
is the Fist ball, foist, fuzz ball, Earthpuff, Bovista, Blind Harry, 
Blindman’s-buff, Devil’s snuff-box, etc. ; it is edible whilst young, 
being then smooth, globose, and yellowish white. When ripe 
its fine brown-black powder is a capital application for stopping 
bleeding from slight cuts, and wounds. This also makes a 
capital drying powder for dusting on weeping eruptive sores 
between approximate parts, as the toes, fingers, and arm-pits. 
When the fungus is burnt its fumes exercise a narcotic effect, 
and will stupefy bees, so that their honey may be removed with 
impunity. It has been suggested that these fumes shall take 
the place of chloroform for performing minor surgical operations 
with its aid. When young, and purely white, the Puff-ball may 
be cut into slices a quarter of an inch thick, and fried in fresh 
butter, with pepper, salt, and pounded herbs, each slice being 
first dipped in egg-yolk. Pieces of its dried inner woolly sub- 
stance, with a profusion of minute snuff-coloured spores, have 
been Jong an article kept by village dames for use to staunch 
cuts, a ready appliance being a piece of Puff-ball to be bound 
over the wound, and left there until healing has taken place. 
Sometimes when a full meal of the Puff-ball, fried in butter, or 
stewed in milk, has been eaten, undoubted evidence of the 
narcotic effects have shown themselves. 
For discerning the Beef-steak fungus already mentioned, its 
peculiar mode of growth is a sufficient guide. It sticks out from 
the trunks of trees, usually near the roots, in a large horizontal, 
flat, oyster-like shape, one layer above another like a section of 
an oyster grotto. When cooked, and laid out on a dish, it 
very much resembles the ear of a colossal negro ; if gathered near 
the sea, particularly on our East Coast, this fungus seems already 
sufficiently seasoned through its briny flavour. By too much 
stewing these edible fungi lose their appetizing moisture, and 
become leathery ; whilst too little cooking leaves them of an 
india-rubber consistency, and not more attractive to the taste. 
Truffles (Tuber cibarium) are not fungi, but subterranean 
tubers of an edible sort found in the earth, especially beneath 
beech trees, and they are uprooted by dogs trained for the 
purpose. In Italy these tubers are fried in oil, and dusted with 
pepper. For epicures they are mixed with the livers of fattened 
_ geese in our Palé de foie gras. They are stimulating, and heating, _ 
