How are these popular notions sustained by the facts? Let us analyze them seriatim and confront each with its refutation, the better to show their entire untrustworthiness.
POPULAR TESTS REFUTED
Worthless popular tests
Pleasant taste and odor (1) is a conspicuous feature in the regular "mushroom" (Agaricus campestris), and most other edible fungi, but as a criterion for safety it is a mockery. The deadly Agaricus amanita, already mentioned, has an inviting odor and to most people a pleasant taste when raw, and being cooked and eaten gives no token of its fatal resources until from six to twelve hours after, when its unfortunate victim is past hope. ([See p. 68].)
The ready peeling of the skin (2) is one of the most widely prevalent proofs of probation, and is often considered a sufficient test; yet the Amanita will be found to peel with a degree of accommodation which would thus at once settle its claims as a "mushroom." Indeed, a large number of species, including several poisonous kinds, will peel as perfectly as the Campestris.
The pink gills turning brown(3) is a marked characteristic of the "mushroom" (A. campestris, [Plate 5]), and, being a rare tint among the fungus tribe, is really one of the most valuable of the tests, especially as it is limited by rules affecting other pink-gilled species.
The stem being easily pulled out of the cap (4) applies to several edible species, but equally to the poisonous.
The notion that edible mushrooms have solid stems (5) would be a very unsafe talisman for us to take to the woods in our search for fungus-food. Many poisonous species are thus solid—the emetic Russula, for example—while the alleged importance of the morning specimens (6) is without the slightest foundation.
The passage quoted here (7), or a statement to the same effect, was quite widely circulated in the newspapers a dozen or more years ago, in an article which bore all the indications of authoritative utterance, the assumption being that the poisonous mushroom would invariably give some forbidding token to the senses by which it might be discriminated.
Woe to the fungus epicure who should sample his mushrooms and toadstools on such a criterion as this, as the most fatal of all mushrooms, the Amanita vernus, would fulfil all these requisites.