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He would gladly take this opportunity of bringing the subject of the Edible 

 tunguses of Herefordshire to the notice of the club. For the last three or 

 four years he had paid some attention to funguses, and he had come to the conclu- 

 sion that they were not only abundant in Herefordshire, but that if the natural 

 size given in the illustrated works he had seen as the average, was con-ect, they 

 were also particularly fine. He was glad also to tell them that several of the 

 kinds which were excellent eating, were very common in the county (a laugh). 

 He had had pleasant experience of their good qualities, and could safely say that 

 vegetable sweetbread, vegetable lambs' kidneys, aye, and vegetable beef -steaks 

 too, of fungus origin, delicious in flavour, rich and wholesome, grew neglected 

 around them (laughter). He accepted their mirth as that of pleasant antici- 

 pation rather than that of unphilosophic disbelief (hear, hear). He spoke from 

 experience, and was now at all times equally ready to gather and bring home the 

 Agaricus procerus and A. deliciosus as he was the ordinary mushroom. It was 

 really a great pity that so much good food should be lost. The waste was 

 due to the very great prejudice existing against Funguses, which means 

 nothing more than very great ignorance about them. Because some veiy 

 common funguses were poisonous all except the mushroom were supposed to be so 

 too. Beyond all question there were very poisonous funguses as there were very 

 poisonous plants, but the venom of the bad did not lessen the good qualities of 

 the wholesome. All that was required was the knowledge to distinguish the 

 one from the other. Nobody refused to eat potatoes because they belonged to a 

 family of virulent poisons. We all eat horse-radish, though not a year iiasses 

 but some families are poisoned by eating scraped aconite root in mistake for it. 

 "We use freely common parsley, though the poisonous fool's parsley grows in 

 every garden, and numerous other examples might be given to show the necei-sity 

 of knowing the good from the evil. According to Berkeley there were about 

 2,380 different kinds of British Funguses, without including those which required 

 a microscope to distinguish their characters. He only marks ten of these as 

 poisonous and six as doubtful, whilst Dr. Badham in his work on esculent 

 funguses gives forty-eight as edible, from his own experience. The vast majority 

 of funguses, therefore, are quite iimoxious, neither poisonous nor edible. It ia 

 unfortunate that some of the moat poisonous are the most common, for there is 

 scarcely a field, and not perhaps a single wood in the county, that does not abound 

 with several varieties of the Coprinus, the Agaricus fascicularis, the beautifully- 

 coloured Russula emetica, and several others. Since they are so abundant in the 

 county it is peculiarly the province of the "Woolhope Club to encourage the study 

 of Mycology, and thus lessen the prejudice existing against them all, by clearly 

 showing the means of distinguishing which are good and which are bad. This waa 

 a matter of some difficulty, for the scientific differences were too minute for ready 

 distinction, and there were no general rules for their guidance without numerous 

 exceptions. They could not be guided by the place they grew in ; nor could they 

 eat after slugs, as they did after wasps and birds with fruit, for elugs seemed to 

 enjoy the most poisonous kinds ; colour gave no distinction, nor was the smell 



