264 FOOTNOTES FROM 



habitants make the most of the productions of their 

 native soil, and easily find substitutes among the cellular 

 plants when their usual food fails them in a season of 

 famine. In India and Africa, likewise, the few edible 

 species that occur have always been highly esteemed ; 

 our common ketchup, it may be remarked, being an 

 Indian invention. A kind of fungus called Mylitta 

 Australia, which grows on the trunks of trees in Van 

 Diemen's Land, and resembles, when dry, hard com- 

 pacted lumps of sago, is so frequently used by the 

 aborigines that it is called "native bread;" while in the 

 wild and desolate island of Tierra del Fuego, the inhabi- 

 tants subsist, during several months, in a great measure, 

 upon a bright-yellow latticed fungus, growing in great 

 abundance on the evergreen beech -trees, and called 

 Cyttaria Darwinii after the accomplished naturalist of 

 the " Beagle," and the author of The Origin of Species. 

 In New Zealand, the gelatinous volva of a species of 

 Phallus called Ileodictyon, is eaten by the natives under 

 the name of thunder-dirt. It has an execrable taste 

 and loathsome smell, in common with the rest of its 

 allies, though its jelly-like consistence would seem to 

 indicate nutritive qualities. Where fungi form the 

 staple or the sole food of the people, it shows that the 

 land is unproductive, or the inhabitants extremely de- 

 pressed by other causes. In this state the New Zea- 

 landers were found by the first emigrants from this 

 country, convulsed and nearly extirpated by intestine 

 wars, and the odious practice of cannibalism, subsisting 

 precariously upon fern roots and fungi, the spontaneous 

 produce of the soil. The land produced no mammal 

 larger than a rat, and yielded neither fruits nor flowers ; 



