The study of the larger fungi has been to me one of the greatest pleasures of my life: when all things else have failed, this has never failed; it has taken me into the pleasantest of places and amongst the best of people. Had it not been for fungi, I should have been dead years ago; often tired, jaded, and harassed with business matters, a stroll in the rich autumn woods has given me a renewed lease of life. In these favourite haunts I never tire or flag; rain, fog, and mud, never detract from the pleasures of the woods to me—I am only depressed in the hot, dry weather of midsummer. In the autumn I constantly visit the forests, with all my collecting paraphernalia; I sometimes take a saw to cut off the big, woody, fungus excrescences of trees. I was once fortunate enough to find a ladder in a wood, which proved invaluable for ascending the beeches in search of Agaricus mucidus, &c. I, however, find fungi everywhere: I only go round the corner, and there they are. I often visit a neighbouring builder's yard, and descend the sawpits, to the amazement of the operatives: some of the rarest species of our Flora, and many new ones, I have found within a few minutes' walk of my own house. I once found a rare Lentinus on a log as it was being carted down King William Street, and a year or so ago an undescribed Peziza flourished inside my cistern.
Collecting fungi is not without its humours as well as its pleasures, as the following will show. I once saw a portly, well-dressed gentleman walking along the high road, with his vasculum over his shoulders, and carrying home (one in each hand) a pair of cast-off, rotten boots, discarded by some vagrant; the rotting leather having produced a crop of rare microscopic fungi. At times abominable cast-off fœtid gipsy rags will be lovingly taken from out a ditch, and choice pieces cut out and consigned to the vasculum of the cryptogamic botanist; at other times some rare species will be seen "up a tree," and it has several times happened in my presence that one enthusiastic botanist has got on to the shoulders of another to secure a prize, or even waded into a pond to get at some prostrate fungus-bearing log. The humours of truffle hunting are manifold. I have seen a gentleman trespass, on hands and knees, through a holly hedge, on to a gentleman's lawn, and there dig up the turf in some promising spot, risking an attack from the house-dog, or a few shots from the proprietor; the said trespasser meanwhile armed with a rake, gouge, and dangerous-looking open knife. Country labourers are often sorely puzzled by the acts of cryptogamic botanists; they stand agape in utter amazement to witness poisonous "frog-stools" bagged by the score. Ofttimes one gets warned that the plants are "deadly pisin"; but collectors are usually looked upon as harmless lunatics, a climax in this direction generally being reached if a gentleman in search of Ascoboli and the dung-borne Pezizæ, sits down, and after making a promising collection of horse or cow-dung, carefully wraps these treasures in tissue paper, and puts them in his "sandwich-box."
One word of warning to the beginner—never, on any account, amass and put away a lot of imperfect materials with insufficient notes, for in the end they will prove worse than useless. To name fungi with certainty the fullest notes and most complete materials are indispensable: without these nothing whatever can be done. It is far better to laboriously make out twenty species, and know them in all their aspects for certain, than to amass imperfect materials of two thousand without any sound botanical knowledge. If the former course is pursued, the study of fungi will prove a never-failing source of pleasure to the mind and of health to the body.
In conclusion, I cannot do better than quote a few words written by the illustrious Fries (now more than eighty years of age) in the preface to a recent work of his on Fungi. He says: "Now in the evening of my life, I rejoice to call to mind the abundant pleasures which my study of the more perfect fungi, sustained for more than half a century, has throughout this long time afforded me.... Therefore, to botanists, who can wander at will the country side, I commend the study of these plants as a perennial fountain of delight and admiration for that Supreme Wisdom which reigns over universal nature."
XIII.
LICHENS.
By the Rev. Jas. Crombie, F.L.S., etc.