THE ALUMNI JOURNAL. 



31 



into dollars at a rate far beyond the wild- 

 est suggestions of confidential advertise- 

 ments. 



The first two requisites for the suc- 

 cessful culture of mushrooms is an even 

 temperature of 50 to 60 degrees, and a 

 quantit}^ of manure A farm is the 

 easiest and best place to start a mush- 

 room bed, for after the manure has been 

 properly dug up by the farmer or one of 

 his hands, his wife or daughter can at- 

 tend to it with more profit than they can 

 to poultry. 



The making of the bed is of course 

 the chief labor. Good clean horse ma- 

 nure mixed with some from the cow's 

 stable should be turned over every day 

 for two or three weeks. It should then 

 be packed in shallow trench and the 

 spawn, which is nothing more or less 

 than the mycelium threads packed close- 

 ly together, should be stuck into the 

 manure at intervals, and the whole thing 

 covered with fresh rich earth and 

 watered occasionally. 



A cellar is, however, an ideal place for 

 mushrooms. If the manure is prepared 

 away from the house it will not give a dis- 

 agreeable odor when packed and covered. 



An Englishman, when writing of a 

 visit to a friend's house, says that when 

 he went down to his cellar to see his 

 method of heating the house, by some 

 hot water system, he found all the avail- 

 able space on the floor covered with little 

 flat mushroom beds that were perfectly 

 odorless, and that had been bearing good 

 crops from November to May. 



There are plenty of practical directions 

 for the culture of mushrooms in the agri- 

 cultural reports and in agricultural mag- 

 azines, and the large florists and horti- 

 culturalists sell the spawn in cakes which 

 can be broken up into bits and sown 

 through the bed. Once it is prepared, 

 if the temperature is constant, all grow- 

 ers declare that beds need but compara- 



tively little attention, and that a crop can 

 be gathered every other day. There 

 seems, then, to be no reason why we 

 should not cultivate this delicacy all win- 

 ter, until the summer woods and fields 

 provide us with the great variety which 

 nature offers. 



BOOK REVIEWS. 



Semi-Annual Report of Schimmel & 

 Co., (Fritsche Brothers), Leipzig and 

 New York, April and October, 1895. 



Few pharmaceutical publications of the 

 year are of more interest and value than 

 the one here under review, not only by 

 virtue of its original contributions to our 

 knowledge of essential oils, but through 

 its intelligent representation of the 

 changes in and present state of the com- 

 merce in them. The most striking feature 

 in the reports of this year, particularly 

 the April report, is their unmistakable 

 evidence of a marked improvement in the 

 quality of this class of products as found 

 upon the market. We feel that the 

 columns of the Materia Medica Depart- 

 ment of the Journal cannot be better 

 used than in printing a resume of this 

 subject compiled from the reports before 

 us. 



The growing importance of ionone is 

 attested by the fact that the Company has 

 thereby been obliged to abandon its cul- 

 tivation of violets, replacing this plant by 

 experimental fields of coriander, parsley, 

 celery and angelica, designed to provide 

 material for the purpose of scientific and 

 practical research, as to the genesis of 

 volatile oil in plants. The first fruits of 

 these experiments are comprised in the 

 following facts established with reference 

 to oil of coriander. The entire plant dis- 

 tilled in a fresh condition during the 

 period of flowering, yielded 12 per cent, 

 of an oil with specific gravity of .853, in- 

 soluble in 70 per cent, alcohol, and with 

 an extremely bug-like odor, which almost 



