30 Rev. W. Houghton's Notices of Fungi 



grows, elaborates the foreign juice and flavour into poison ; 

 and to discern the different kinds country-folk and those who 

 gather them are alone able. Moreover they imbibe other 

 noxious qualities besides ; if, for instance, the hole of a 

 venomous serpent be near, and the serpent breathe upon them 

 as they open, because, from their natural affinity with poison- 

 ous substances, they are readily disposed to imbibe such 

 poison. Therefore one must notice the time before the ser- 

 pents have retired into their holes. . . . The whole existence 

 of a boletus from birth to death is not more than seven days " 

 (Nat. Hist. xxii. 22). 



The boletus of the ancients, from the above description of 

 it by Pliny, clearly belongs to the genus Amanita of modern 

 mycologists, and has nothing to do with the boletus as now 

 applied to those fungi whose hymenium consists of tubes or 

 pores. The genus Amanita, of which there are several 

 British species, is characterized by the presence of a wrapper 

 or volva, which at first envelopes the fungus, and which often 

 remains in patches on the pileus, as mentioned by Pliny. 

 Tradition has referred the species to A. ccesareus, so called as 

 being that one which was instrumental in poisoning Claudius 

 Caesar ; and there is no reason to doubt that this is the famed 

 boletus of the ancient Romans. Mr- Bicknell says it is now 

 universally called uovolo, and is to be seen in the markets of 

 Milan, Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, Cremona, Bologna, and 

 other Lombard cities from the middle of September to the 

 middle of October. He usually had it cut up and stewed or 

 fried in butter ; at the commencement of the season it is worth 

 about one shilling the pound. Lenz gives as the modern 

 Italian names of this fungus, uovolo, uovolo ordinario, uovolo 

 commune, uovolo rancio (orange-coloured) ; at Verona, fongo 

 ovo,fongo bolado } and bole, in which two latter instances the 

 ancient Roman name still survives, while the ordinary name 

 of uovolo reminds one of Pliny's words " like the yolk in the 

 egg^ 1 In lib. xvi. cap. 8, Pliny, among the various products 

 of the oak, mentions boleti and suilli, which he calls the most 

 recently discovered stimulants for the appetite (" gulaj novis- 

 sima irritamenta "), as growing around their roots; he says 

 the quercus (Q. robur?) produces the best kinds, and that the 

 robur (Q. robur, var. ?), cypress, and pine yield noxious ones. 

 From this it would appear that boleti (A. cvesareus) were not 

 much used as food before the time of the empire ; boletus as a 

 Latin name occurs only in the writings of Pliny, Juvenal, and 

 Martial, and the Greek /3(oXlr / n'i does not occur before the time 

 of Galen (a.d. 130) ; the noxious kinds of boleti may refer to 

 A. muscarius or A. ]jhuttotdes } but this is mere conjecture ; 



