[60] Haller relates, that the inhabitants of Piedmont are in the habit of swallowing a small piece of this Agaric, when they have drunk with their water some of those small leeches in which it abounds. Bomare mentions of this same Agaric, that the inhabitants of Balcu use it in powder to heal blains in their cattle. [61] Hunter. [62] It is the Frenchman’s _heart_! “J’ai mal au cœur” means, as every one knows, in the French tongue, not ‘I am sick at heart,’ as it professes to say, but ‘I am sick at stomach’! [63] Walpole. [64] The phrase “I like it, but it does not like me,” which one sometimes hears at table, having a reference to some particular idiosyncrasy of the party who makes the remark, does not invalidate the truth of this general proposition. [65] Pope. Mead, if anybody, ought to have been good authority on the subject of this particular diet. He had written, _ex professo_, upon poisons; and the Florentine mycologist Micheli had dedicated several newly-discovered funguses to him. He was therefore both a Toxicologist and a Mycologist. [66] “No thought too bold, no airy dream too light, That will not prompt your Theorist to write; No fact so stubborn, and no proof so strong, Will e’er convince him he _could_ argue wrong.”—_Crabbe._ [67] Broussais divides inflammatory dyspepsia into _five_ parts or acts. That Leach of leeches, whose word once passed for more than it was worth, came at last to see himself and his _sangsues_ utterly abandoned, and to have the mortification of lecturing in his old age to empty benches. “Quantum mutatus ab illo” of less than twenty years before, and who had been the cause of as much innocent bloodshedding as Napoleon himself, and used to kill his patients that his leeches might be fed! [68] “Fungus qualiscunque sit semper _malignus_.”—_Kirker, Lib. de Pest._ [69] “_Apage_ ergo perniciosa isthæc gulæ blandimenta.” [70] “Quot colores tot dolores, quot species tot pernicies.” [71] M. Roques gives at the end of his treatise on funguses a long list of his mycophilous friends, including in the number many of the most eminent _medical_ men of the French capital—if medical men are more careful of what they eat than their neighbours, which, however, is exceedingly doubtful. [72] “To eat raw mushrooms” was a proverbial expression among the Greeks, as is shown by the passage which Athenæus quotes out of a play of Antiphanes, called the ‘Proverbs’:—Ἔγω γάρ ἂν τῶν ὑμετέρων φάγοιμί τι, μύκητας ὠμοὺς αὔτικ’ ἂν φαγεῖν δοκάω.