Poisonous Fungi by John Ramsbottom - Keeper of Botany British Museum (Natural History) (1945).pdf

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POISONOUS FUNGI
By
JOHN RAMSBOTTOM
Keeper of Botany British Museum
(Natural History)
With Colour Plates
by
ROSE ELLENBY
The
K I N G P E N G U I N
Books
PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED
LONDON
and
NEW YORK
1945
THE KING PENGUIN BOOKS
Editor: N. B. L. Pevsner
Technical Editor: R. B.
MADE IN GREAT BRITAIN
Text Pages printed by
EDINBURGH
R. &
R. CLARK, LTD.,
Set in Monotype Bembo
Colour Plates
Made & Printed by JOHN SWAIN & SON, LTD.
Cover design by
JOY JARVIS
PUBLISHED BY
PENGUIN BOOKS
INC. 245 FIFTH
AVENUE NEW YORK
PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED
HARMONDSWORTH MIDDLESEX
ENGLAND
POISONOUS FUNGI
Doubtless so soon as man learned by experience that fungi
could serve as food he found also that some were
poisonous. It is not therefore surprising that the first
mention we have of fungi refers to this; when the poet
Euripides (48o-4o6 B.C.) was at Icarus a woman with two
grown-up sons and a married daughter ate fungi gathered
from the fields and were 'destroyed by pitiless fate in one
day'. There are repeated references to poisoning in classical
writings, and this may give the impression that fungi were
regarded as forbidden fruit. Indeed Pliny's query, `What
great pleasure then can there be in partaking of a dish of so
doubtful a character as this?' has often been quoted in
support of this view: he was, however, warning against
Suillus
(Boletus edulis)
which was very conveniently
adapted for administering poisons, by which whole
families and guests had recently been removed. If fungi
had not been commonly eaten, why the frequent warnings?
Many rich Romans valued them so highly that they
employed special collectors. Among these patrons was
Caesar Claudius poisoned by his wife Agrippina, who
`offered unto him a mushroom empoisoned knowing that
he was most greedy of such meats'. He `descended into
heaven' and his stepson Nero called fungi `the food of the
gods' in reference to Claudius's deifications, an irregular
one at Colchester and the normal one at death. The
mushroom was doubtless
Amanita caesarea,
much
prized on the Continent but absent from this country. To
many the very word fungus suggests something
mysterious, something morbid. Some of the early
herbalists seeking a derivation for the word found it in
funus
(a funeral) and
ago
(to put in motion):
For Mary (Fungi officio, 1939-1945)
John Ray while doubting its correctness considered it
appropriate.
Amanita caesarea is
one of the few
species that can be recognised with certainty from the
old descriptions. It was comparatively easy to describe
herbs, shrubs and trees clearly enough for them to be
recognised; indeed many of the old names are still used.
But toadstools are for the most part short-lived and
irregular in occurrence and their distinguishing
characters are not very easy to grasp. Consequently,
instead of clear descriptions of those species which were
known to be safe and those which are dangerous,
various rules were given for distinguishing the two
groups. These rules were repeated by the herbalists and
many of them have a world-wide currency even today.
The primary division into edible and poisonous species
influenced the classification of fungi until comparatively
recent times.
With the gradual recognition of the essential characters
for distinguishing species a more exact knowledge of the
gastronomic qualities of fungi was attained. As a result
we know that all rule-of-thumb methods for
differentiating between edible and poisonous species are
without the slightest value and, further, despite popular
belief, the number of poisonous fungi is not legion but is
very small: the plates in this booklet have had to be eked
out with edible fungi! The title `Poisonous Fungi' is
therefore somewhat misleading except in so far that all
have been described as such sometime or other. With the
realisation that most fleshy fungi are non-poisonous
there is difficulty in defining the common terms
mushroom and toadstool. So long as only the Field
Mushroom with, at most, one or two of its near relatives
were regarded as edible, it was easy to define a
mushroom as an edible fungus and a toadstool as a
poisonous one, as indeed is customary. If, however,
edibility is the criterion we have in this country
hundreds of mushrooms and possibly a dozen
toadstools, which completely reverses the picture.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary both
terms were originally applied indiscriminately to all
umbrella

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