Dearness: Mushroom Poisoning 



77 



basket ; indeed, that he had been " very particular to gather only 

 fresh, clean specimens." While I suspect that this beautiful and 

 highly commended toadstool is slightly poisonous, I believe that 

 had the consumer under notice made its acquaintance more grad- 

 ually he might have brought himself to eat " three platefuls of it " 

 with safety. When we consider that, properly remorseful for 

 scouting his wife's advice, he imagined that he had eaten a potful 

 of deadly toadstools, we cannot wonder that his overloaded 

 stomach made him feel sick enough to die. 



C. Both terms of the binomial Helvetia esculenta, suggest eating 

 — wholesale and wholesome. Some European mycophagists have 

 written commendations of this fungus. Berkeley's reference to 

 its edibility is tempered with the caution that it is unsafe for some 

 persons, a circumstance dependent rather on a peculiarity of the 

 person's constitution, than upon some deleterious quality of the 

 plant. The personal equation does not seem wholly sufficient to 

 explain the history of the cases cited under C. Helvetia escu- 

 lenta, or Gyromitra as it is now called, cannot be mistaken for 

 any other species, hence the variously toxic effects referred to 

 may all be surely ascribed to the fungus named. These did not 

 appear, it is needless to say, and were not suspected, after the 

 first meal. Yesterday, they seemed nutritious or at least innocu- 

 ous ; to-day, they are poisonous to the same persons. In view of 

 all that I could learn, it seemed more probable that the poison 

 developed in the collected fungi than that it was started during 

 their digestion. For a genuinely fleshy fungus, Gyromitra is not 

 readily putrescible. Specimens taken from the same ground lay 

 on my table a week or more without any sign of change save 

 shrinkage in volume. 



The heavy sickening odor given off by Amanita phalloides and 

 A. verna in drying is well known. In the slow relaxation by 

 moist air in a closed vessel of well-dried specimens of Helvetia 

 crisp a, Boletus Clintonianus, and Agaricus silvicola — three spe- 

 cies named in the edible lists — I have observed the development 

 of a similar odor. The odors may not have any connection with 

 the deadly alkaloid present in the Amanita, but they are evidence 

 of some similar chemical change. 



Among the unstable nitrogen compounds present in some of 



