linked with the fly, the toad, the cock, and the thunder- 
bolt: and so we studied these to see what associations 
they conveyed to our remote forebears. Wherever we 
traveled we tried to enter into contact with untutored 
peasants and arrive at their knowledge of the fungi—the 
kinds of mushrooms that they distinguished, their names, 
the uses to which they put them, and their emotional 
attitude toward them. We made trips to the Basque 
country, to Lapland, to Friesland, to the Provence, to 
Japan. We scoured the picture galleries and museums of 
the world for mushrooms and we pored over books on 
archeology and anthropology. 
| would not have you think that we ventured into all 
these learned paths without guidance. We drew heavily 
on our betters in the special fields that we were explor- 
ing. When we were delving into questions of vocabulary, 
when we worked out an original etymology for a mush- 
roomic word, we were always within reach of a philolo- 
gist who had made of that tongue his province. And soin 
all branches of knowledge. Sometimes it seems to me that 
our entire work has been composed by others, with us 
merely serving as rapporteur. Since we began to publish 
in 1956, persons in all walks of life have come to us in in- 
creasing numbers to contribute information, and ofttimes 
the contributions of even the lowliest informants are of 
highest value, filling a lacuna in our argument. We were 
amateurs unencumbered by academic inhibitions, and 
therefore we felt free to range far and wide, disregarding 
the frontiers that ordinarily segregate the learned disci- 
plines. What we produced was a pioneering work. We 
know, we have always known better than the critics, the 
flaws in ours, but our main theme, which we adumbrated 
rather diffidently in Mushrooms Russia and History in 
1957, seems to have stood up under criticism. If I live 
and retain my vitality, you may see published over the 
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