10 



HOTA-Ii HOltTICULTUKAL SOCIETY. 



appointment of an official person capable of determining the 

 noxious or innocent nature of the species brought for sale. 

 What tends, however, still more perhaps to increase our objection 

 to their use, is the natural inaptitude of our countrymen to 

 acquire the art of cookery, which is a very important element in 

 suiting these plants to human digestion ; added to which, there 

 is the difficulty of adopting new customs, or changes of diet. 

 "Were a taste for these productions, however, once established, 

 we should soon find numerous species brought forward as valuable 

 additions to our means of sustenance. 



Notwithstanding that Truffles have been considered articles of 

 luxury, and have commanded a high price from the time of the 

 Romans down to the present, and that it has ever been the aim 

 of horticulturists to bring them into the number of regular 

 garden crops, they seem hitherto to have defied all efforts to 

 reclaim them, and to resemble, in their intractable disposition, 

 the wild ass, " whose house has been made the wilderness, and the 

 barren lard his dwellings, who scorneth the multitude of the 

 city, and the range of the mountains is his pasture." If this, then, 

 be a correct representation of their character, it is a question 

 whether it would not be easier to cultivate them by assisting 

 Nature in her own way, than to restrict her within our limits by 

 forcing these denizens of the forest to occupy a place in our 

 kitchen-gardens. It would seem, indeed, that the amount of 

 shade they demand is such as to be incompatible with the re- 

 quirements of a garden. But let us see what has been done 

 hitherto in the various endeavours made to grow Truffles by the 

 assistance of art. And here we cannot do better than give the 

 information with which the Messrs. Tulasne present us in their 

 beautiful work on Hypogseous Fungi. They mention four spe- 

 cies of Truffles exclusively in use in Trance, viz. T. onelanosporum, 

 T. brumale, T. cestivum, and T. mesentericum, of which two, or 

 perhaps three, occur in Great Britain. Tuber cestivwn is appa- 

 rently the only species to be met with in a recent state in our 

 shops ; T. mesenteriewn may at times occur, but it has not yet been 

 noticed there. T. brumale, if our plant be identical with Tulasne's, 

 has hitherto been found in England of too small a size to be worth 

 sending to market. In Italy there are other kinds, one of which, 

 T. magnatum, commands a higher price than any other; and in 

 the southern parts of Italy, Sicily, Syria, and Africa, another spe- 

 cies, Terfezia leonis, is of common use as an article of food. 



The true Truffles have rough seeds, which, seen under the older 



