1886.] 
SKETCH OF CURTIS. 
67 
The privations of the civil war, causing a scarcity of meats, turned his 
attention more strongly to this subject. A southern gentleman, whom 
the writer recently met, and who was a lad at Hillsborough during a 
part of the war period, not only referred to Dr. Curtis with the greatest 
degree of veneration and pride, but described his enthusiasm on the sub¬ 
ject of food fungi during those trying years, when he taught his friends 
and neighbors how to recognize the safe and palatable ones, and suc¬ 
ceeded in establishing their very general use. In his letter to the Rev. 
Mr.^Berkeley on the “Edible Eitngi of North Carolina,” written 
after the war, he shows a vast amount of minute information about 
these plants and the enthusiasm not only of the scientific man but of the 
worldly mycophagist as well. It is indeed very entertaining reading; 
and in it he reiterates his former statement that “ in some parts of the 
country, I could maintain a regiment of soldiers five months of the 
year upon mushrooms alone.” 
He also advances the interesting theory that as some excellent spe¬ 
cies occasionally produce, when growing from certain substrata, offens¬ 
ive and unwholesome specimens, the material nourishing a fungus had 
a great deal to do with its food-qualities, on account of the inability of 
the fungus to assimilate that material after the manner of higher plants. 
In these days, when an interest in the subject of fungus-food is 
springing up among the cultivated classes of this country, it is of im¬ 
portance to find how very far the experiments of this isolated but gifted 
scholar were carried a full generation ago, under not simply the stimulus 
of curiosity or a cultivated taste, but the strong pressure of a people’s 
possible necessity. He was indeed in this, as in many things, far in ad¬ 
vance of his time. His interest went so far as to minutely describe, in 
popular language, about forty species of food-fungi, to illustrate which, 
colored drawings were made by his son, now Rev. C. J. Curtis. This 
work, entitled “ Edible Fungi,” has never been published. But at this 
late day, a portion (about one third) will see light iA VVm. Wood & Co’s. 
“ Reference Hand-book of Medicine,” now publishing. Let us 
hope that the day is not far distant when a publisher, enterprising 
enough to bring out the whole, will be found. 
Dr. Curtis never spoke or wrote unless he had something of import¬ 
ance to say. His papers, therefore, are apt to be brief, but they are all 
valuable. The last publication of importance was his “ Catalogue,” 
already referred to, in which he gives, all too briefiy, the results of his 
life work in botany in the form of an almost bare list of the plants he 
knew, or knew to grow, within the liordei’S of North Carolina. There 
are in this list: 
Flowering Plants. 1873 species 
Higher Cryptogams - - - - - - - - 315 “ 
Lichens. 217 “ 
Algse.52 “ 
Fungi .^892 “ 
Total. 4849 “ 
