HE earnest plea of Dr. Badham for 

 this neglected — rather, I may say, 

 spurned — spontaneous harvest of 

 fungi is well worth emphasizing in our pages ; afford- 

 ing, as it does, a most suggestive commentary on the 

 universal popular ignorance, so far as America is con- 

 cerned, of the economic value of this perennial of- 

 fering of Nature, which abounds in such luxuriance 

 throughout our continent. 



" I have this autumn myself," he writes, " witnessed 

 whole hundred -weights of rich, wholesome diet rot- 

 ting under trees ; woods teeming with 

 The spurned food, and not one hand to gather it ; 

 harvest and this, perhaps, in the midst of a po- 

 tato-blight, poverty, and all manner 

 of privations, and public prayers against imminent 

 famine. 



" I have, indeed, grieved, when I have reflected on 

 the straitened condition of the lower classes this year, 

 to see pounds innumerable of extempore beefsteaks 

 growing on our oaks in the shape of Fistulina hepat- 

 ica; Agaricus fusipes, to pickle, in clusters under 

 them ; Puff-balls, which some of our friends have not 



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