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tell her to be carefid that she did net gather the poisonous Lactarms tor- 

 xninosus, the destroyer, which has yellow milk and a woolly margin, she 

 would say again, " Lord, sir, I dont want nothing to do with to,-mmosus, or 

 woolly margins, or yellow milk. I goes by orange milk and green stams-- 

 them-s my marks, and I don't want nothing else " (laughter) ; and the good 

 dame-s philosophy is right if hmguses have the distinctive characters we know 

 them to possess. It is by positive and not by negative characters that they 

 must be practically know if they ever are to be kno^vn (hear, hear). One 

 v,ther point he would also mention, and that was one which seemed never to 

 be thou-ht of, namely, that the fungus should be ripe and mature to be eaten 

 in perfection. Many present, for instance, had not that respect they should 

 have for the vegetable beef -steak (hear, hear). " It was tough," or " It tasted 

 of oak bark ;" but had they taken care that it was ripe when gathered ? Mr. 

 Berkeley had said somewhere that he had once tasted it and found it excellent 

 which he supposed was due to the skill of his friend's cook. He (Dr. Bull) 

 would su-est that he had once tasted it fully gro^vn, soft, and ripe before it 

 was submitted to that excellent cook's manipulation. If the vegetable beef- 

 steak was really ripe, it was not by any means a dish to be despised (hear, 

 hear) They aU knew how necessary it was to catch the proper time of 

 ripening of the different pears. Until the right time they were often un- 

 eatable. He had a pear-tree in his garden-the Beurre d'Aremberg, if he 

 remembered rightly-which required to be kept a few days after it had laecome 

 yellow and soft. When it first becomes yellow, and you think it ripe, it 

 tastes so like the scents prevailing in a druggist's shop that it has got the name 

 in his family of " the medical pear," but in a few days more the disagreeable 

 flavours soften down to an exquisitely rich, delicious fruit. They all know 

 the sa>'ing with reference to the Jargonelle pear, and Mr. La Touche Ukes 

 popiilar proverbs (hear, hear, and laughter), "That you must sit up in the tree 

 all night to catch it in perfection." Now, if aU this care is necessary mth 

 reference to a fruit which takes more months to grow than the fungus takes 

 days, one ought to be electrically sensitive to the precise moment of matura- 

 tion of a mushroom (hear, hear). They had to be sure, therefore, in judging 

 of a fungus that it was not only in good condition, but that it was ripe when 

 fathered" (hear, hear). Dr. Bull then proceeded to introduce the subject of 

 Sclerotia for discussion, for which he had been announced. He described 

 them as smaU, hard, nodular bodies, varjning in size and shape, and colour, 

 which were often observed on decaying agarics and other vegetable substance. 

 They were made into a separate class of agarics at the end of the last century, 

 and many different kinds were named. It was observed, however, that they 

 never bore fruit themselves, but were constantly the source from which fruit 

 bearing agarics were produced, and further research proved that instead of 

 bein- a separate order themselves, they were but one condition of other 

 fun<^ses-con8isting in fact of compact masses of mycelium-dormant states of 

 more perfect plants. Dr. Bull then went into more minute details, and 



