The _Agaricus muscarius_ is largely employed in Kamtchatka, in decoction 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.