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