PUFK BALLS. I 27 



honey. These, and no other, were believed to be the 

 reasons why puff balls were sent into the world, 

 excepting, perhaps, certain schoolboys who imagined 

 that Providence had supplied them to their hands as 

 instruments of torture to be applied to their fellows, 

 by an outward application to noses and eyes. 



The danger of the latter mode of utilizing the puff 

 ball was illustrated at Edinburgh a few years since. 

 The assistant to a learned professor, making prepar- 

 ation for a coming lecture, was industriously operating 

 upon a large puff ball, which had been kept exposed 

 and covered with dust. In order to remove this 

 dust and make the specimen fit for exhibition on the 

 lecture table, it was brushed and beaten so that a 

 perfect cloud of the minute spores enveloped the 

 unsuspecting operator. These minute bodies found 

 entrance by his mouth and nostrils, with such effect 

 that he was confined to his bed for many days, under 

 the care of most competent medical men, and 

 narrowly escaped with his life. 



In Norfolk these large puff balls, found at the 

 margins of corn fields in harvest time, are locally 

 known as " Buffers," or, as some prefer to write it, 

 " Bullfists," and in other counties they appear also to 

 have local names, so that they are well known to the 

 natives. In all stages they have a sinister reputation, 

 and we remember the horror caused on one occasion 

 by our determination to have a portion of one cooked 

 for our own consumption. On all hands it was 



