MUSHROOM CULTURE. 



477 



tion is different from wliat we are accustomed to give it. 

 It is ordinary stable manure^ not droppings, or very short 

 stuff, and it is tkrown into heaps four or five feet liigli, and 

 perhaps thirty feet wide. The men were employed turning 

 this over, the mass being afterwards stamped down with 

 their feet, a water-cart and pots being used to thoroughly 

 water the manure where it is dry and white. 



As many will feel an interest in the cave culture of the 

 Mushroom, and perhaps wish to see it for themselves, I 

 may state that it is difficult to obtain permission to visit 

 the caves, and many persons would not like the look of the 

 ''ladder^' which affords an entrance. Even with a well- 

 known Parisian horticulturist I had some difficulty in 

 entering them. We were informed that one Champignon- 

 niste in the same neighbourhood demands the exorbitant 

 price of twenty francs for a visit to his cave. As the visit 

 is a work of some little time, no visitor should, put the 

 cultivators to this trouble without offering some slight re- 

 compense — say five francs. The above cave is but a sample 

 of many in the immediate neighbourhood of Paris. 



We will "next visit a Mushroom cave of another type 

 at some little distance from that city. It is situated near 

 Frepillon, Mery-snr-Oise — a place which may be reached 

 in an hour or so by the Chemin de fer du Nord, passing by 

 Enghien, the valley of Montmorency and Pontoise, and 

 alighting at Auvers. There are vast quarries in the neigh- 

 bourhood, both for building-stone and the plaster so largely 

 used in Paris. The materials are not quarried in the ordi- 

 nary way by opening up the ground, nor by the method 

 employed at Montrouge and elsewhere in the suburbs of 

 Paris, but so that the interior of the earth looks like a vast 

 gloomy cathedral. In 1867 the culture was in full force 

 at Mery, and as many as 3000 lbs. a day were sometimes 

 sent from thence to the Paris market; but the Mushroom 

 is a thing of peculiar taste, and these quarries are now 

 empty — cleaned out and left to rest. After a time the 

 great quarries seem to become tired of their occupants, or 

 the Mushrooms become tired of the air; the quarries are 

 then well cleaned out, the very soil where the beds rested 



