That some kinds of mushrooms are poisonous is a truth of which every farm labourer seems aware. But that some of those which have been reputed poisonous are inert, is beyond their philosophy, and only receives at present the sanction of some of the more scientific, who have directed their studies thitherward. The fly agaric is one of those justly-reputed poisonous species, occasionally found in this country, but which grows plentifully in Kamtschatka and Siberia. A recent author of an account of Russia states, “that mushrooms virulently poisonous in one country are eaten with safety in another, is well known in other cases, as, for instance, in that of the fly mushroom (_Amanita muscaria_), which is common in England, and always poisonous there, while in Kamtschatka it is used as a frequent article of food.” Then he inquires into the reasons wherefore this should be the case:——“It is not enough to say that difference of soil and climate explain the mystery; for though we know that culture changes the properties of plants, converting what is poisonous in the wild state into a wholesome esculent when raised in the garden—as in the case of the common celery, for example—yet throughout the whole of the vegetable kingdom we find almost no other instance of a plant which is poisonous in one country becoming wholesome, without culture, when transplanted to another, and left entirely to itself, and in both placed in apparently the same circumstances as to soil, &c. After all, a great part of the secret may lie, not in the plant, but in the mode of preparing it for the table. So far as we can judge, the Russian cook, on first cutting up these spoils of the forest, makes a much more copious use of salt than is done with us; and the efficacy of this agent in deadening the poisonous quality, is sufficiently proved by the melancholy case recorded in medical treatises, of a French officer and his wife, both of whom died in thirty-two hours after eating certain mushrooms, while the person who supplied them, and his whole family, made a hearty and wholesome meal from the same gathering.” In this case, it appears that while the former took them without addition, the latter first salted them strongly, and then squeezed them well before using them. M. Roques says distinctly that this plant has not its poisonous properties modified by any climate. The Czar Alexis lost his life by eating this mushroom. The details of its effects upon the Kamtschatkans by Krascheminikow, in his natural history of that country are explicit, respecting the delirious intoxication induced by it, Gmelin and Pallas also equally certifying its intoxicating powers. Roques reports seven different sets of observations respecting its deleterious effects on man.