"You are the most expensive guest I have had in a long time," remarked the host, with a smile, the following day. "I must think what we can have this evening for dinner; or, better, consult with madame. There is plenty of champagne in which to cook truffles, if the cook and the truffles were in evidence. I told her I wanted plenty of truffles for you, and the remaining eleven cans of the dozen in the larder were tendered you last night." The truffle has formed the theme of numerous books and treatises. To the French gastronomer who may obtain the fresh product during a large portion of the year, the work of M. M. Moynier will unquestionably prove of the greatest value--a major portion being devoted to a scientific analysis of the various dishes, with their recipes, in which the esculent may properly figure. It is justly claimed by the author that wine is an indispensable accompaniment of this "astonishing production" or any dish in which it may enter; but that sweet champagne to which women are so partial masks rather than quickens its flavour.[53] The mycologist who simply wishes to know the species and habits of hypogæus fungi will no doubt prefer the monograph of Vittatini, Milan, 1831; that of M. Tulasne, Paris, 1852; and the instructive work of Dr. de Ferry already cited. Few more interesting fields for research offer themselves than that presented by the black pearl which is concealed beneath the soil--living its strange life beyond the ken of human eye, and revealing itself only through the agency of the animals employed by man to discover it, and of the insect tribes that hover above it in their dance of rivalry and love. Savarin, above all writers, has considered the truffle philosophically in his comparatively brief reference; and although he failed to answer the question, "What is the truffle, how is it produced, and how does it grow?" he has still appraised its virtues in his own inimitable way. That it is digestible has been amply proven before, and this point did not require his researches to substantiate. The only charges that history records against it are gluttony in eating it, and the fact that Lartius Licinius, a person of prætorian rank, while minister of justice at Carthage in Spain, upon biting a truffle found a denarius inside, which cost him the loss of a tooth--a proof to Pliny that it was nothing but an agglomeration of elementary earth. Of certain attributes it is supposed to possess, the sixth Meditation of the "Physiology," to which the reader is referred, will speak clearly for itself; and it will be sufficient to transcribe the conclusion of the learned chancellor's deductions: "_La truffe n'est point un aphrodisiaque positif; mais elle peut en certaines occasions rendre les femmes plus tendres et les hommes plus aimables._" Referring to Savarin's conclusion, Dr. de Ferry makes this statement, based on professional experience: