72 THE FUNGI PREVAIL AT NIGHT AND IN EPIDEMICS. 



We are thrown back, therefore, by a kind of necessity, 

 on its vegetable origin, and among vegetables we find none, 

 whose habitudes and modes of action, so strongly as the 

 fungi, entitle them to the sad distinction of creating this 

 singular malady. They grow in autumn, they grow at 

 night, they are disarmed by light and heat, they have ex- 

 traordinary tenacity of life and texture, and yet are re- 

 pressed by very slight alterations of soil and circumstance. 

 They are usually poisonous, and produce curious and diver- 

 sified maladies. Women are less affected than men by 

 their poison, and children escape more readily than men 

 and women. Some of them, after sending their poison 

 through the system, escape unchanged by some one of the 

 emunctories, as the amanita muscaria, by the kidneys. 

 As we are reasoning upon probabilities here, let me ask 

 what animal poison, what mineral poison, offers so many 

 and so strong analogies, to entitle us to esteem it a cause 

 of the milk-sickness. 



