314 SHAKESPEARE’S [ TOADSTOOL. 
Toadstool. 
Trortus anp Cressipa, ii, I, 22. 
Or MusHrooms or TOAD-STOOLS. 
Some mushrooms grow forth of the earth; other upon 
the bodies of old trees. Many wantons that dwell near 
the sea, and have fish at will, are very desirous for change 
of diet to feed upon the birds of the mountains; and such 
as dwell upon the hills or champaign grounds do long after 
sea-fish ; many that have plenty of both do hunger after 
the earthy excrescences called mushrooms. The mushrooms 
or Toadstools, which grow upon the trunks of old trees, 
very much resembling Jew’s-ear, do in continuance of time 
grow unto the substance of wood, which the fowlers do call 
touchwood. This kind of mushroom is full of poison. 
With fuzz-balls, puck-fists and bull-fists in some places of 
England they use to kill or smoulder their bees, when they 
would drive the hives, and bereave the poor bees of their 
meat, houses and lives; these are also used in some places, 
where neighbours dwell far asunder, to carry and reserve 
fire from place to place. Poisonsome mushrooms groweth 
where old rusty iron lieth, or rotten clouts, or near to 
serpents’ dens, or roots of trees that bring forth venomous 
fruit. Divers come up in April, others grow later about 
August. To conclude, few of them are good to be eaten, 
and most of them do suffocate and strangle the eater ; 
therefore I give my advice unto those that love such 
strange and new-fangled meats to beware of licking honey 
among thorns, lest the sweetness of the one do not counter- 
vail the sharpness and pricking of the other. Fuzz-balls 
are noway eaten; the powder of them is fitly applied to 
merigalls, kibed heels and such like. 
Gerara’s ** Herbal,” sv. 
Tobacco. 
[Though Shakespeare does not mention Tobacco, allusions 
to it are very frequent in the other dramatists of his time.] 
Our adulterate Nicotian or Tobacco, so called of the 
Knight Sir Nicot that first brought it over, which is the 
spirit’s Incubus, that begets many ugly and deformed phan- 
tasies in the brain, which being also hot and dry in the 
