A. Frostiana. Poisonous. Smaller and more delicate than the two preceding. Cap smooth or with yellow scales or wart-like patches. Gills yellow or tinged on edge with yellow. Stem white or yellow, the ring evanescent, but always leaving a yellow mark on stem. Volva yellow, breaking up into yellow fluffy fragments.
Far better for the amateur to let the A. Cæsarea, and anything resembling it, respectfully alone.
New York, Gansvoort. Circle forty feet in diameter. Peck, 32d Rep.; Maryland. There is not a doubt that this fungus can be eaten with impunity, Banning; Alabama, abundant. Edible. Alabama Bull. No. 80.
Rogues and Cordier, French writers, regard it as the finest and most delicate of fungi, the perfume and taste being exquisite.
The writer has not had opportunity to eat A. Cæsarea. If such should occur he would go about it very cautiously. No suspicion attaches to it abroad, but evidence is accumulating in the hands of the writer (not yet convincing) that either locality may render it poisonous or that A. muscaria varies so much in appearance as to deceive even the expert into mistaking it for A. Cæsarea. It is possible that A. muscaria is, at times, in certain localities, harmless; but no such exception as this is noted in the entire fungoid realm. It is not so common that collectors should mourn its waste. It is better, far, to let it alone.
** Volva splitting regularly all around; pileus bearing thick warts, etc.
A. musca´ria Linn.—musca, a fly. (Plate [VI], fig. 4, p. [6]. Plate [IX].) POISONOUS. Pileus 4 in. and more broad, normally at first blood-red, soon orange and becoming pale, whitening when old, globose, then convex and at length flattened, covered with a pellicle which is at first thick, and in wet weather glutinous, but which gradually disappears, and sprinkled with thick, angular, separating fragments of the volva; margin when full-grown slightly striate. Flesh not compact, white, yellow under the pellicle. Stem as much as a span long, shining white, firm, torn into scales, at first stuffed with lax, spider-web fibrils, soon hollow; the adnate base of the volva forms an ovate bulb, which is marginate with concentric scales. Ring very soft, torn, even, inserted at the apex of the stem, which is often dilated. Gills free, but reaching the stem, decurrent in the form of lines, crowded, broader in front, white, rarely becoming yellow.
Var. rega´lis, twice as large. Stem stuffed, solid when young, as much as 1–2 in. thick, becoming light-yellow within; the volva terminates in 8–10 concentric squamoso-reflexed rows of scales. Pileus very glutinous, bay-brown or the color of cooked liver. Gills yellowish.
Var. formo´sa, soft, fragile. Pileus at first lemon-yellow, with mealy, lax, yellowish, easily-separating warts, often naked. Gills often becoming yellow. A. formosa, with the warts rubbed off.
Var. umbri´na, thinner and more slender. Stem hollow, often twisted, bulb narrowed. Pileus at first umber, then livid, with the exception of the disk, which is dingy-brown. Gills at length remote. Stev.