Notwithstanding its fatal character, this mushroom, it is said, is habitually eaten by certain peoples, to whom the poison simply acts as an intoxicant. Indeed, it is customarily thus employed as a narcotic and an exhilarant in Kamchatka and Asiatic Russia generally, where the Amanita drunkard supplants the opium fiend and alcohol dipsomaniac of other countries. Its narcotizing qualities are commemorated by Cooke in his Seven Sisters of Sleep, wherein may be found a full description of the toxic employment of the fungus.
The writer has heard it claimed that this species of Amanita has been eaten with impunity by certain individuals; but the information has usually come from sources which warrant the belief that another harmless species has been confounded with it. The warning of my Frontispiece may safely be extended to the fly-amanita. Its beautiful gossamer veil may aptly symbolize a shroud.
Forewarned and forearmed
By fixing these simple structural features of the Amanita in mind, and emphasizing them by a study of our Frontispiece, we may now consider ourselves armed against our greatest foe, and may with some assurance make our limited selection among this lavish larder of wild provender continually going to waste by the ton in our woods and pastures and lawns. For it is now a fact generally believed by fungologists, and being gradually demonstrated, that the edible species, far from being the exception, as formerly regarded, are the rule; that a great majority of our common wild fungi are at least harmless, if not positively wholesome and nutritious as food.
THE POISONOUS ALKALOID
The toxic and deadly effects of certain mushroom poisons, as already described, have been known since ancient times; and the prolonged intoxicating debauches to-day prevalent among the Amanita dipsomaniacs of Northern Russia and Kamchatka, consequent upon the allurements of the decoction of the fly-agaric, are well-known matters of history.
The true chemical character of this poison, however, was not discovered until 1868, when it was successfully isolated by chemical analyses of Drs. Vigier, Schmiedeberg, Currie, and Koppe, and ascertained to be an alkaloid principle, to which was given originally the name of bulbosine, since variously known as muscarine, and finally and most appropriately amanitine.
Mr. Palmer's discovery
The poison thus identified, it was reserved to an American authority on edible fungi, Mr. Julius A. Palmer, of Boston, to discover the fact of its confinement to but one fungus family—the Amanita.
In the year 1879, in an article contributed by him to the Moniteur Scientifique, of Paris, he states: