that when such traits betoken the attitudes of whole tribes 
or peoples, and when those traits have remained unaltered 
throughout recorded history, and especially when they 
differ from one people to another neighboring people, 
then you are face to face with a phenomenon of profound 
cultural importance, whose primal cause is to be dis- 
covered only in the well-springs of cultural history. 
Many have observed the difference in attitude toward 
mushrooms of the European peoples. Some mycologists 
in the English-speaking world have inveighed against this 
universal prejudice of our race, hoping thereby to weaken 
its grip. What a vain hope! One does not treat a consti- 
tutional disorder by applying a band-aid. We ourselves 
have had no desire to change the Anglo-Saxon’s attitude 
toward mushrooms. We view this anthropological trait 
with amused detachment, confident that it will long re- 
main unchanged for future students to examine at their 
leisure. 
Our method of approach was to look everywhere for 
references to mushrooms. We gathered the words for 
‘mushroom’ and the various species in every accessible 
language. We studied their etymologies. Sometimes we 
rejected the accepted derivations and worked out new 
ones, as in the case of ‘mushroom’ itself and also of 
‘chanterelle.” We were quick to discern the latent meta- 
phors in such words, metaphors that had lain dead in some 
cases for thousands of years. We searched for the mean- 
ing of those figures of speech. We sought for mushrooms 
in the proverbs of Europe, in myths and mythology, in 
legends and fairy tales, in epics and ballads, in historical 
episodes, in the obscene and scabrous vocabularies that 
usually escape the lexicographer; in the writings of poets 
and novelists. We were alert to the positive or negative 
value that the mushroom vocabularies carried, their my- 
cophilic and mycophobic content. Mushrooms are widely 
[ 189 ] 
