40 Eev. W. Houghton's Notices of Fungi 



kind, as, for instance, the very poisonous A. {Amanita) vernus. 

 According to Eparchides (apud Athenseus), when Euripides 

 was on a visit at Icarus, a certain woman, with two full-grown 

 sons and an unmarried daughter, gathered some fungi from 

 the fields, and all the family partook of them and died. 

 "Whereupon the poet made the following epigram upon them : — 



T {2 tov ayijpavrov ttoKov aWepos rj\ie repvaiv, 



ap eldes Toiovd' oppari Trpocrde ndoos ; 

 fxrjTipa Trap6fviKi]v re K.6pr]v DitTcrovs re crvva.ip.ovs 



ev ravTco (piyyet. poipidia (pdipevovs. 



11 Sun, that cleavest the undying vault of heaven, hast 

 thou ever before seen such a calamity as this ? — a mother 

 and maiden daughter and two sons destroyed by pitiless fate 

 in one day ?" 



With a view probably to destroy any dangerous properties 

 it was sometimes recommended that they should be boiled ; 

 thus Diocles, in his first book on ' Wholesomes,' says, 

 " Certain things which grow wild, as beet, mallow, sorrel, 

 nettles, orach, bulbs, vhva (truffles), and fungi (fiii/cns), should 

 be boiled/' 



Diphilus, a physician who lived about the beginning of 

 the third century B.C., and who wrote a book on ' Diet suit- 

 able for persons in good and bad health,' says that " fungi 

 {^vK7]Te<i) are of good taste, and pass easily through the 

 bowels, and are nourishing ; " but still " that they cause indi- 

 gestion and flatulence, especially those from the isle of Ceos ; 

 many, however, cause death : the wholesome kinds appear to 

 be those which are easily peeled, are smooth and readily 

 broken, such as grow on elms and pines ; the unwholesome 

 kinds are black, livid, and hard, and such as remain hard 

 after boiling ; such when eaten produce deadly effects. A 

 remedy for this poison is a draught of honey and water, or 

 honey and vinegar, or soda and vinegar ; after the draught 

 the patient should vomit. It is therefore always desirable to 

 dress fungi with vinegar, or honey and vinegar, or with 

 honey and salt, by which means the choking properties are 

 destroyed." Athenseus adds, " Theophrastus, in his Treatise 

 on Plants, writes, ' Plants of this kind grow both under the 

 ground and on the surface, such as those which some people 

 call 7re£et?, which grow together with fungi (/xvkt)<;) ) for 

 these are without roots ; while the [avktjs has at the beginning 

 of its attachment to the ground a stalk of some length, from 

 which roots [the mycelium] extend themselves. Theophrastus 

 says also, that in the sea around the Pillars of Hercules, 

 where there is much water, fungi are produced close to the 

 sea, which people say have been turned into stone by the 



