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.