A treatise on the esculent funguses of England / containing an account of their classical history, uses, characters, development, structure, nutritious properties, modes of cooking and preserving, etc.

by David Badham

ON THE ESCULENT FUNGUSES OF ENGLAND.

“Quos ipsa volentia rura

Sponte tulere sua carpsit.”—Virgil.

“He culls from woods, and heights, and fields,

Those untaxed boons which nature yields.”

ETYMOLOGIES.

By the word μύκης, ητος or ου, ὁ, whereof the usually received root, μῦκος (mucus), is probably factitious, the Greeks used familiarly to designate certain, but indefinite species of funguses, which they were in the habit of employing at table. This term, in its origin at once trivial and restricted to at most a few varieties, has become in our days classical and generic; Mycology, its direct derivative, including, in the language of modern botany, several great sections of plants (many amongst the number of microscopic minuteness), which have apparently as little to do with the original import of μύκης as smut, bunt, mould, or dry-rot, have to do with our table mushrooms. A like indefiniteness formerly characterized the Latin word fungus, though it be now used in as catholic a sense as that of μύκης; this, in the classic times of Rome, seems to have been confined (without any precise limitation, however) to certain sorts which might be eaten, and to others which it was not safe to eat. The

“Fungos colligit albos,”[5]

which occurs in Ovid’s ‘Fasti,’ alludes to the former; the