TOXICOLOGICAL STUDIES ON THE MUSH- 
ROOMS CLITOCYBE ILLUDENS AND 
INOCYBE INFIDA 
Ernest D. Clark and Clayton S. Smith 
With Plate 91 
Introduction 
It had already become evident from our earlier observations 
that Inocybe infida must be considered a poisonous mushroom, 
both when judged by its efifects on man after ingestion^ and 
also from its action when injected into frogs. ^ Both the clin- 
ical data from the reported cases of poisoning and our own expe- 
rimental results indicated a poison of the general type repre- 
sented by the muscarin of the fatal Amanita muscaria. How- 
ever, the usual symptoms were not produced in frogs receiving 
injections of the poison in Inocybe infida. As is the case with 
muscarin, the Inocybe poison acted more particularly upon the 
nervous system and seemed to be similar to the narcotic poison 
found by Ford® in the closely related Inocybe infelix. A 
more detailed study of the action of Inocybe infida and certain 
other fungi upon the exposed heart appeared to be desirable and 
in this paper we present the results of such experiments. 
Increased interest in this work was stimulated by the very 
many fatalities, in the fall of 1911, which were caused by eating 
poisonous mushrooms. After the autumn rains in September of 
that year, the newspapers of the temperate zone of this continent 
and Europe contained many notices of death from this cause. In 
one period of ten days there were tzuenty-two such deaths in the 
vicinity of New York City. In scarcely a single fatal case was 
* Murrill. A New Poisonous Mushroom. Mycologia i: 21 1. 1909. 
^ Clark and Kantor. Toxicological Experiments With Some of the Higher 
Fungi. Mycologia 3 ; 175-88. 1911. 
® Ford. Distribution of Haemolysins, Agglutinins and Poisons in Fungi, 
etc. Jour. Pharmacol, and Exp. Therapeutics 2; 285-318. 1911. 
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