The veil covers the gills of the young plant and later is seen as a collar-like ring on the stem, soft, lax, deflexed, in old specimens it is often destroyed. The spores are white and broadly elliptical.
The history of this plant is as interesting as a novel. Its deadly properties were known to the Greeks and Romans. The pages of history record its undoing and its accessory to crime. Pliny says, alluding to this species, "very conveniently adapted for poisoning." This was undoubtedly the species that Agrippina, the mother of Nero, used to poison her husband, the Emperor Claudius; and the same that Nero used in that famous banquet when all his guests, his tribunes and centurions, and Agrippina herself, fell victims to its poisonous properties.
However, it is said this mushroom is habitually eaten by certain people as an intoxicant; indeed, it is used in Kamchatka and Asiatic Russia, generally, where the Amanita drunkard takes the place of the opium fiend and the alcohol bibber in other countries. By reading Colonel George Kennan in his "Tent-life in Siberia," and Cooke's "Seven Sisters of Sleep," you will find a full description of the toxic employment of this fungus which will far surpass any possible imagination.
It caused the death of the Czar Alexis of Russia; also Count de Vecchi, with a number of his friends, in Washington in 1896. He was in search of the Orange Amanita and found this, and the consequences were serious.
In size, shape, and color of the cap there is similarity, but in other respects the two are very different. They may be contrasted as follows:
Orange Amanita, edible.—Cap smooth, gills yellow, stem yellow, wrapper persistent, membranaceous, white.
Fly Amanita, poisonous.—Cap warty, gills white, stem white, or slightly yellowish, wrapper soon breaking into fragments or scales, white or sometimes yellowish brown.
Found along roadsides, wood margins, and in thin woods. It prefers poor soil, and is more abundant where poplar and hemlock grow. From June to frost.
