with the _Epilobium angustifolium_, as an intoxicating liquor.[55] The
Laplanders smear it on the walls and bedposts of their dwellings, to
destroy bugs (Linn.); and Clusius relates, that it is sold extensively
in the market at Frankfort, to poison flies; for this purpose, it is
either cut into small pieces and thrown about the premises, or else
boiled in milk and placed upon the window-sills; in either case it is
vastly inferior in efficacy to that celebrated “mort aux mouches,” the
impure oxide of cobalt, that is, to the arsenic which this contains. The
above are a few of the uses, exclusive of the esculent or medical ones,
to which funguses have been put; it is fair, however, to notice that
they maintain a debtor, as well as a creditor, account with mankind, in
which the balance seems to be occasionally quite against us; those that
are most injurious are generally, as has been already stated, of the
microscopic kinds; whereof some attack young plants still underground,
emulging them completely of their juices, in consequence of which they
perish; others, like the corn-blights, permit the plant to attain
maturity before they begin their work of destruction, and destroy it just
as it is beginning to fructify.[56] The fearful epidemics to which grain
so infected has given rise are well known, though it is still a matter of
question whether the ergoted corn owes its unwholesome qualities to the
injury which it had sustained from the blight, or to the blight itself.
Though the mischief produced by parasitic funguses be unquestionably
great, this occasional and very partial evil is more than compensated by
the much greater amount of good accomplished solely by their agency, in
the assistance they afford to the decomposition of animal and vegetable
tissues, which has procured for them the name, not unaptly applied, of
“nature’s scavengers.” This decomposition they effect by assimilating,
through the medium of their radicles, the juices of the decaying
structure in which they are developed, loosening thereby its cohesion,
and causing it to break up into a rapid dissolution of its parts.[57]
MEDICAL USES.
Of the funguses formerly employed in medicine few are now in vogue;
the ergot of rye still keeps its ground, and in cases of protracted
labour, when judiciously employed, is valuable in assisting nature
when unequal to the necessary efforts of parturition. Another fungus,
formerly much in fashion, though now put on the shelf, seems really to
deserve further trial; I mean the _Polyporus suaveolens_ (Linn.), which
in that most intractable disease, tubercular consumption, surely claims
to be tried when there are such respectable authorities to vouch for its
surprising effects, in cases where everything else had been notoriously
unsuccessful.[58] Sartorius was the first to prescribe it as a remedy
in phthisis, and its employment with this view, since his day, has at
various times been præconized on the Continent; the dose generally
recommended being a scruple of the powder two or three times a day. Of
the cases published by Professors Schmidel and Wendst (which have an air
of good faith in their recital, well entitling them to consideration), I
abridge one as an example, though the others are not less interesting;
and while it is certainly to be regretted that the absence of
stethoscopic indications should prevent our having any positive evidence
as to the precise condition of the diseased lung, or of the nature of the
secretion expectorated, still, even supposing them to be simple cases of
chronic bronchitis, with marasmus the efficacy of the remedy is scarcely
less striking or instructive. “A young man, ætat. twenty-one, was seized
at the beginning of autumn with inflammatory cough and hæmoptysis,
which were partially subdued by V. S. and the ordinary antiphlogistic
treatment; but the cough, coming on again with renewed severity during
the winter, was accompanied with the expuition of glairy mucus, which was
sometimes specked with blood. Towards the spring the young man had become
much thinner, and was continuing to waste away; the expectoration also
had changed its colour, and had become fetid and green; his nights were
feverish and disturbed; he had no desire for food, and ate but little;
his ankles had begun to swell; he had copious night-sweats and diarrhœa.
A teaspoonful of an electuary of the _P. suaveolens_ in honey was given
him three times a day, and _nothing else_; and, extraordinary as it may
appear, under this treatment the sweats speedily began to diminish with
the cough, and after a three months’ continuance of the medicine the
patient entirely recovered.”[59]
The _Polyporus laricis_, the so-called Agaric of pharmacy, is a
powerful but most uncertain medicine, and has been also recommended in
consumption. I once administered a few grains of it in this disease,
when violent pains and hypercatharsis supervened, which lasted for
several hours. MM. B. Lagrange and Braconnot found it to contain a large
quantity of an acrid resin, to which it no doubt owes its hypercathartic
properties. To judge from this single case, which, however, tallies with
the experience of others, I should say that this fungus was, in medicine,
to be looked upon as a very suspicious ally.[60] The _A. muscarius_ has
also been used in medicine. Whistling, so long ago as 1778, wrote on
its healing virtues, in Latin, recommending its powder as a valuable
application with which to sprinkle sanious sores and excoriated nipples.
Plenck gave drachm doses of it internally in epilepsy, and, together with
Bernhard and Whistling, attests its success. It appears that the _Phallus
mucus_ in China, and the _Lycoperdon carcinomale_ near the Cape of Good
Hope, are used also by the inhabitants of those countries as external
applications for cancerous sores. The _Phallus_, rubbed upon the skin, is
said to deaden its sensibility, like the _narke_, or electric skate.
FUNGUSES CONSIDERED AS AN ARTICLE OF DIET.
If all the good things ever said about the stomach since the days of
Menenius Agrippa, or before his time, could be collected, they would
doubtless form an interesting volume; Aretæus has somewhere quaintly, but
not unaptly, called it the “house of Plato;” in another place he speaks
of it as the “seat” (as if κατ’ ἐξοχὴν) “of pleasure and of pain;” and so
it is indeed, and it has moreover a notorious tendency, when provoked,
to cool our charity and to heat our blood; its sympathies by nervous
attachments, both of “continuity” and of “contiguity,”[61] with the other
organs of the body, are extensive and complicated; no wonder then that it
should have enlisted ours in its behalf, and that few of us would offend
it wittingly, though by indiscretions we do offend it continually.
In the “sensual philosophy,” of the French school particularly, the
stomach has received marked attention, ranking in that country as the
most noble of the _viscera_.[62] Even in those republican times when no
other rights were held sacred throughout France, the privileges of the
stomach were respected; when men found that they might get on quite as
well, or better, with a bad heart, but that they could not get on so well
without a good digestion, it is not so much to be wondered at if they
made idols of their bellies, established a School of Cooks to rival the
School of Athens, and became famous for “those charming little suppers
in which they used to set the decencies of life at defiance.”[63] But
if in France far too much attention has been paid to the culinary art,
too little attention has surely been paid to it at home; for the art
of cookery, properly understood, is not only the art of pleasing the
palate, but the stomach also.[64] In France, the dinner is the thought
of the morning, and sometimes the business of the day, but in France
everybody dines; in England, where the word ‘dinner’ never occurs till
it is announced, a few wealthy men dine well, the middling ranks badly,
and the poor not at all. Not that even the poorer orders generally want
the necessary materials for such repast; they frequently consume more
butcher’s meat than is consumed by their Continental neighbours; it is
simply that they want skill in preparing it. If it be scanty, they cannot
tell how to make the most of it; if it be homely, they cannot tell how
to improve its flavour by uniting and blending with it a certain class
of inexpensive luxuries, which, though they grow everywhere throughout
the country, are everywhere neglected. Touching the wholesomeness or
unwholesomeness of these, I have now a few words to address to the
common-sense reader; that is, to him who prefers feasting upon funguses
to fasting out of mere prejudice. Formerly men used to refer such
questions as this to their physician; they would
“Try what Mead or Cheselden advised.”[65]
intending, perhaps, to take some little poetical license with it
afterwards. Abernethy, on the anecdote of the oysters and oyster-shells
being duly substantiated, would have been _ostracized_ from polite
society in those days of decorous etiquette, when, as medical men
affected to be more _dientereumatic_ with the insides of their patients
than any of us now pretend to be, they must needs have been far more
affable when consulted on such cases than we of the present day might
be; though they did not therefore always answer the same question in the
same way; one, for instance, “Le médecin Tant Pis,” would frequently
_proscribe_ the very things that his rival, “Le médecin Tant Mieux,” had
just been recommending. When men came to find they must either give up
some favourite article of food or else give up the anathema pronounced
against it, they generally preferred the latter course, and were sure, to
use a medical phrase, to “do well” if they did so; whilst a few wretched
hypochondriacs, adopting the other alternative, and living strictly _en
régime_, became only the more hypochondriacal for their pains.
None but a determined theorist[66] would nowadays think of prescribing
diet for the stomach of a single patient, far less for all those of a
polygastric public; neither does an enlightened, self-educated public,
that can read Liebig and thoroughly appreciate its own case, hold out
much encouragement for such advice. The day is past without return for
long-winded prose epic on indigestion; a livelier mode of dealing with
the subject of _non-naturals_, in the shape of novels and romances, has
won the public ear. Broussais’ five-act tragedy of ‘Gastro-Enteritis’[67]
has received its last plaudits; already has Crabbe’s _euthanasia_ to this
class of authors attained its full accomplishment:—
“Ye tedious triflers, Truth’s destructive foes,
Ye sons of Fiction clad in stupid prose,
O’erweening teachers, who, yourselves in doubt,
Light up false fires and send us far about,
Long may the spider round your pages spin,
Subtle and slow, her emblematic gin.
Buried in dust and lost in silence dwell,
Most potent, dull, and reverend friends, farewell!”
No article of diet was ever half so roughly handled as the fungus.
What diatribes against it might be cited from the works of Athenæus,
Dioscorides, Galen, Pliny, the Arabian physicians, and all their
commentators! What terrible recitals, too, of poisoning from some
few species have been industriously circulated, and the unfavourable
inference drawn from these, been applied to the whole tribe—a mistake
which some writers, even in modern times, have perpetuated. Thus, Kirker
votes the whole “a family of malignants;”[68] thus too Allen and Batarra
pen unsolicited _apages_,[69] and warn us, in an especial manner, to
beware of them; while Scopoli includes in his very definition of a
fungus, that it is of a class of plants which are always to be suspected,
and which are for the most part poisonous. Tertullian, with more of
epigram than of truth, makes out, that for every different hue they
display there is a pain to correspond to it, and just so many modes of
death as there are distinct species;[70] to all which, and a great deal
more similar rhapsody and invective, tens of thousands of our Continental
neighbours in the daily habit of eating nothing else but funguses might
reply, in the words of Plautus—
“Adeone me fuisse _fungum_ ut qui illis crederem?”
Those who abuse funguses generally do so from prejudice rather than
from personal experience, objecting to their flesh as being heavy of
digestion, and to their juices as being more or less prejudicial to
health. Some say they are too rich, others of too heating a character.
These objections are for the most part without foundation, as those who
eat them can abundantly testify. To quote the authority of one or two
medical friends on the Continent, formed on large personal experience, in
favour of the excellence of this diet, Professors Puccinelli of Lucca,
Briganti of Naples, Sanguinetti of Rome, Ottaviani of Urbino, Viviani of
Genoa, are all consumers of funguses. Vittadini, whose excellent work on
the esculent kinds of Italy is without a rival, himself eats, and gives
us ample receipts for dressing them. In France, a similar service has
been rendered to the public by Paulet, Persoon, Cordier, and Roques,[71]
who have severally published excellent treatises on the various kinds fit
for food, as they occur in the different provinces; whilst the influence
of the last winter has been the means of introducing several new species
into the Parisian markets, thus causing them to be very generally known.
Not to multiply individual testimony needlessly, let that of Schwægrichen
suffice, who tells us, that on seeing the peasants about Nuremberg eating
_raw_ mushrooms,[72] he too, for several weeks, restricted himself
entirely to this diet, “eating with them nothing but bread, and drinking
nothing but water, when, instead of finding his health impaired, he
rather experienced an increase of strength.” _Vegetior evasit!_ as the
inscription at Rome relates to have been the case with St. John when
he emerged, after one hour’s cooking, from a caldron of boiling oil. In
a word, that which has been the daily bread of nations—the poor man’s
manna—for many centuries, cannot be an unwholesome, much less a dangerous
food.[73] Funguses, no doubt, are a rich and dainty fare; and so whatever
objections apply to made-dishes _in genere_ may apply also to these,
which, while they contain all the sapid and nutritious constituents of
animal food, have however an advantage over it—viz. that while they are
as rich in gravy as any butcher’s meat, their texture is more tender,
and their specific gravity less. Touching the general question as to the
wholesomeness of made-dishes, it might perhaps be stated as a rule, to
which there are many exceptions, that the more we vary and combine food,
the better chance there is of our digesting it.[74] “You must assist
nature,” Hippocrates says, “by art. You must vary your viands and your
drinks. Music would tire if it were always to the same tune, so also does
a monotonous regimen tire.[75] Cooks therefore make _mixed_ dishes, and
he who should always make the same dish would deservedly pass for not
being a cook at all.”[76] And though Sydenham, in apparent discordance
with this, recommends _one_ dish for dinner, it is quite for another
reason. Plain food may indeed suit some stomachs, but good cooking suits
all stomachs; and when Seneca writes, that “there are as many diseases as
cooks,” Roques takes him up properly by replying, “Yes; as bad cooks.”
The rule for every dinner, plain or compound, is to dress it well—“that
which is best administered is best;” and good cooking, thus understood as
the art of improving and of making the most of a thing, is a matter of
equal importance to both rich and poor. It is a safe rule, I believe, and
one recommended on good authority too, if men wanted authority on such
matter, to eat what they like, but not as much of it as they like.[77]
Nine-tenths of dyspeptics become so from overfeeding. “Nauseosa satietas
non ex crassis et pravis solum, sed etiam boni succi alimentis provenit.”
Even Paracelsus, though an undoubted quack, might give some people a
hint: “Dosis sola facit ut venenum sit vel non; cibus enim vel potus
qualibet quantitate majore æquo assumtus venenum fit.” Dyspeptics are
willing to enlist your sympathies in their behalf by telling of the
delicacy of their mucous membrane, just as young countesses descant with
more success on the extreme susceptibility of their nerves; nor is it
always kindly received, if a well-wisher should remind them that their
sufferings may not after all have been the fault either of their stomach
or of the dish which they blame, but of their own indiscreet use of both.
Whilst it is an acknowledged fact on all hands that infants are overfed,
and that all children overfeed, men are by no means so prone or willing
to admit that gluttony is perhaps the very last of childish things that
they are in the habit of putting away from them. Thus, then, though
funguses are not to be considered unwholesome, they are, like other good
things, to be eaten with discretion and not _à discrétion_. “If you live
an indolent life, are a sybarite in your heart, or should some violent
passions (choler, jealousy, or revenge) be dealing with you, take care
in such a case how you eat ragouts of truffles or of mushrooms; but if,
on the contrary, your health be good, your life temperately prudent,
your temper even, and your mind serene, then (provided you like them)
you may eat of these luxuries without the slightest apprehension of their
disagreeing with you.” M. Roques adds, and with truth, “it is the wine,
surcharged with alcohol, of which men drink largely, in order, as they
say, to relish and digest their mushrooms and made-dishes, that disagrees
with the stomach, and that will, ere long, produce those visceral
obstructions, and those nephritic ailments, at once so grievous to bear
and so difficult to get rid of.”[78] If the reader shall retain _one_
word of the following homely lines, and that word the last, so as to
remember it in place, he will owe us no fee, and it will save him many a
bitter draught:—
Lies the last meal all undigested still?
Does chyle impure your poisoned lacteals fill?
Does Gastrodynia’s tiny gimlet bore,
Where the crude load obstructs the rigid door?
Or does the fiery heartburn flay your throat?
Do darkling specks before your eyeballs float?
Do fancied sounds invade your startled ear?
Does the stopt heart oft wake to pulseless fear?
Your days all listless, and your nights all dream,
Of Pustule, Ecchymose, and Emphyseme;
Till ruthless surgeon shall your paunch explore,
And mark each spot with mischief mottled o’er;
Does all you suffer quite surpass belief?
Has oft-tried soda ceased to give relief?
Has bismuth failed, nor tonics eased your pain?
Have Chambers, Watson, both been teased in vain?
In case so cross—what cure?—but one: _Refrain_!
But the objection against funguses is generally of another kind:
many persons who like good living too well to be afraid of the new
introduction of a luxury which is to bring new dyspepsias for them in
consequence, fear lest, whilst indulging in this “celestial manna,” this
βρῶμα θεῶν, they should meet with the fate of the Emperor Claudius, and
prefer remaining _vivi_ to the chance of becoming _divi_ before their
time. Now there is really no just ground for this fear; the esculent
fungus never becomes poisonous, nor, conversely, the poisonous variety
fit to eat. In Claudius’s particular case we must remember that Locusta
medicated, and Agrippina cooked, that celebrated dish, in which the
mushrooms, after all, were but the vehicle for the poison. As to the
general fact, though cultivation undoubtedly produces considerable
changes in the qualities of this, as in those of other classes of plants,
they are never of such a kind as to convert that which is esculent in
one locality into a dangerous food in another. “Cœlum non animum mutat;”
οὐ γὰρ τὸν τρόπον ἀλλὰ τὸν τόπον μόνον μετήλλαξα.[79] That the mushroom
is not quite so wholesome when cultivated as it is in the meadow,[80]
in a state of nature, cannot be doubted;[81] and that many persons have
suffered, both in France and England, more or less gastric disturbance
after eating those taken from hotbeds or from dark foul unaerated places,
is certain; that mushrooms also in decay, when chemistry has laid hold
of their tissues and changed their juices, have produced disagreeable
sensations in the stomach and bowels, is not to be questioned; finally,
that the idiosyncrasy of some persons is opposed to this diet, as that of
others is to shell-fish, to melons, cucumbers, and the like, must also
be ceded: but none of these admissions surely meddle with the question,
nor go any way towards proving the assumed fact, viz. that a mushroom
ever changes its nature and becomes poisonous like the toadstool.[82] It
has been unwarily asserted, that because the people of the north are in
the habit of employing in their kitchen the _Agaricus muscarius_, which
is known to be poisonous in the south, this points to some remarkable
difference in the plant depending on difference of locality. It is
to be recollected, however, that this very same fungus, if taken in
sufficient quantity, without the precaution usually adopted of soaking
it in vinegar before cooking, _has_ produced fatal accidents, of which
we read the recitals in various mycological works; and only not more
frequently because the plant, being generally well steeped in brine or
acetic acid, is in most cases robbed of deleterious principles, the only
residue left being pure fungine, which is equally innoxious and the same
in all funguses whatever. It is moreover worthy of remark, that though
the common mushroom (_Ag. campestris_) varies considerably both as to
flavour and wholesomeness (circumstances attributable in part to the
varieties of soil in which it flourishes[83]), other funguses, on the
contrary, being mostly restricted for their alimentation and reproduction
to some one particular habitat, do not present such differences. The
_Boletus edulis_, the _Fistulina hepatica_, the _Agaricus oreades_, the
_Ag. procerus_, the _Ag. prunulus_, the _Ag. fusipes_, the _Cantharellus
cibarius_, etc., are, in flavour and other sensible qualities, just the
same in England as they are in France, Switzerland, or Italy. Thus the
objection to eat funguses on the ground of their presenting differences
depending on those of the locality where they grow, applies principally,
if it applies at all, to the English mushroom, of which no housekeeper is
afraid, and by no means to those species the introduction of which into
our markets and kitchens forms the main object of this treatise.
Besides the foregoing objections to funguses on the general ground of
their supposed indigestibility, or else the more particular one of
their not being at all times and in all places the same, a further and
weightier one, as it is commonly urged, is the alleged impossibility of
our being able to discriminate, with certainty, the good from the bad; an
objection which derives much of its supposed weight from the apparently
clashing testimonies of authors respecting the same species, who not
unfrequently describe, under a _common_ name, a fungus which some of them
assert to be esculent, some doubtful, and others altogether poisonous
in its qualities. Such discrepancies, however, have already in many
cases been satisfactorily adjusted, whilst a more minute attention and
corresponding improvement in the pictorial representation of species is
daily diminishing the errors of the older mycologists.
Admitting then, what there is no gainsaying, the existence of many
dangerous individuals in this family,[84] ought we not, in a matter of
such importance, rather to apply ourselves to the task of discriminating
them accurately[85] than permit idle rumours of its impracticability, or
even its real difficulty, to dehort us from the undertaking? Assuredly
nature, who has given to brutes an instinct, by which to select their
aliment, has not left man without a discriminative power to do the same
with equal certainty; nor does he use his privileges to their full, or
employ his senses as he might, when he suffers himself to be surpassed by
brute animals in their diagnosis of food.
MODES OF DISTINGUISHING.