118 



Liglit banter and pleasant riJioule has been plentiful, and those who de- 

 sire to extend the right of appreciation of Funguses are grateful for it. It has 

 drawn much attention to them ; it has kept them in memory ; and is proving 

 with them, as it does so constantly prove in other matters, the incentive to a 

 desire for further information. This is all that is required. A student has only 

 to take up the subject, and the Funguses themselves wUl secure his continued 

 interest, by their beauty, their edible virtues, their poisonous qualities, or by 

 the endless variety and peculiarity of growth which they present. 



There has, however, been one serious and laboured attack on their edible 

 virtues which requires a more exact notice. In a Medical Review of the front 

 rank, " The British and Foreign Medico-Chu'urgical Review," for January of 

 the present year, 1869, a prominent place is given to an article, some seven 

 pages long, on Dr. Valenti-Serini's work on Suspected and Poisonous Funguses 

 of the Territory of Siena—" Dei Fungbi sospetti e velenosi del territorio Senese," 

 per Franceso Valenti-Serini— published under the authority of the Royal 

 Academy of Medicine of Turin. The book has an introduction of only twenty 

 pages, and, notwithstanding this, it embraces the whole subject of the origin, 

 nature, and chemical analysis of Poisonous Funguses, the symptoms they pro- 

 duce, the means of treatment, and the facts observed after death. There are 56 

 plates of the size of nature and coloured. 



The Reviewer gives the work throughout unqualified praise ; and in an 

 article, the whole tenor of which is directed against Edible Funguses, dwells 

 minutely on the effects of the Poisonous ones, and says that particular attention 

 ought to be called to this work, now that the Society of Arts is engaged "in 

 collecting and diffusing information to show that our fungi, with few"exoeptions, 

 and these easily discriminated, may safely be eaten." No such statement as this 

 was made by the Rev. M. J. Berkeley at the Society of Arts, and had the writer 

 known anything of Funguses himself he could not have supposed that so absurd 

 a statement would be made. The article bears internal evidence of this ignorance 

 of the subject, not only in its guarded expressions — its inverted sentences— and its 

 indiscriminate praise, but also by the fact that it is chiefly made up by trans- 

 lations appropriated but not acknowledged, and by long avowed quotations. In 

 short, it has been simply written to order, and is really very discreditable to the 

 character of the Review in which it appears. 



These remarks are severe, but they are just. There is one point on which 

 you can test for yourselves the Reviewer's assertion of " the extreme value of 

 this book to science and humanity" on the present occasion. Here are two 

 F-angnses— Lactarius deUciosus And Coprinus comatus, which have been gathered 

 in our excursion to-day. Hei-e are the coloured representatives of them from 

 the Transactions of the Woolhope Club ; and here are the plates given in Dr. 

 "Valenti-Serini's book (laughter). It is but common charity to suppose that the 

 reviewer has never seen any of the many exceUeut English coloured plates of 

 Funguses. 



