“I do not think that the urine would keep very long, and decomposition would destroy the Amanitine, which I believe to be the intoxicating principle. If I remember aright, it has been obtained as an alkaloid.”—(Personal letter from Dr. J. W. Kingsley, Cambridge, England, dated Aug. 18, 1888.) “If the Yakut was a good and loving spouse, he would go directly home and eject the contents of his stomach into a vessel of water, which then he placed out of doors to cool and collect; and from the rich, floating vomit his wife and children would afterwards enjoy a hearty meal. The lucky possessor of a stomach full of Vodki may, in a benevolent mood, similarly dispose of a part of his repletion, minus the water, and away to the Eastward, among the Tchuchees, families are often regaled even to inebriation with the natural fluid discharge from the bodies of fortunate tipplers.... Saving the natives themselves it is their most disgusting institution, and if any Christian missionary be earnestly seeking a fresh field to labor in, I can assure him that no soil is more desperately in need of cultivation than the Tchuchee Country.”—(“In the Lena Delta,” George W. Melville, Chief Engineer, U. S. Navy, Boston, Massachusetts, 1885, page 318.) “_Amanita muscaria_ has been employed as fly-poison, whence its vulgar name. M. Poquet states that climate does not modify its poisonous qualities. The Czar Alexis died from eating it, yet the Kamtchatkans eat it, or are said to do so, as also the Russians. In Siberia, it is used as an intoxicating agent. Cook says it is taken as a bolus, and that its effects combine those produced by alcohol and haschish. The property is imparted to the fluid secretion (urine) of rendering it intoxicating, which property it retains for a considerable time. A man, having been intoxicated on one day and slept himself sober the next, will, by drinking this liquor to the extent of about a cupful, become as much intoxicated as he was before.... Urine is preserved in Siberia to this end.... The intoxicating property may be communicated to any person who partakes ... to the third, fourth, and even fifth distillation.”—(M. C. Cook, “British Fungi,” London, 1882, pp. 21, 22.) Henry Lamsdell (“Through Siberia,” London, 1882, vol. ii. p. 645) describes the “fly agaric.” He says that it is used by the Koraks to produce intoxication. “So powerful is the fungus that the native who eats it remains drunk for several days; and by a process too disgusting to be described, half a dozen individuals may be successively intoxicated by the effects of a single mushroom, each in a less degree than his predecessor.”