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.