Part 2
The words _champignon_ and _mushroom_ have both a French origin, though, like the corresponding derivatives from the Greek and Latin, they too have come to signify things different from what they originally designated; _champignon_, for example, of which _champ_ would seem to be the root, is _generic_ in France. The ‘Traités sur les Champignons’ of Bulliard, Persoon, Paulet, Cordier, and Roques, are treatises of funguses _in genere_; whilst in England we restrict the word _champignon_ to one small Agaric, which, as it grows in the so-called “fairy-rings,” is hence named _Ag. oreades_. Again, there can be no doubt that our word _mushroom_ (which, as contradistinguished from _toadstool_, is so far generic) comes from the French _mouceron_ (originally spelt _mousseron_), and belongs of right to that most dainty of funguses, the _A. prunulus_, which grows amidst tender herbage and _moss_ (whence its name), and which is justly considered, over almost the whole continent of Europe, as the _ne plus ultra_ of culinary _friandise_. It abounds in various parts of England, being everywhere trodden underfoot, or reaped down, or dug up as a nuisance, while the rings which it so sedulously forms are as sedulously destroyed. The very odour which it exhales under these injuries, which the French call “un parfum exquis aromatisé,”[12] and the Italians, “un odore gratissimo,”[13] is in England occasionally cited to its disadvantage in confirmation of its supposed noxious qualities. Thus, while we use the word _mushroom_, which is the proper appellation of _this_ species, for another (very good, no doubt, but wholly unlike it in its botanical characters, flavour, and appearance), this neglected, and ignorantly neglected, species, finds itself deprived of its rightful name, and proscribed as a toadstool. The origin of this last word, _toadstool_, which makes them seats or thrones for toads, does not quite satisfy me, I confess, though there be doughty authorities for it in Johnson’s Dictionary and in Spenser’s ‘Faery Queen’!
“The grisly todestool grown there mought I see, And loathed paddocks lording on the same;”
and, though an anonymous Italian authority declares that, in Germany, they have actually been seen sitting on their stools,[14] still, even in Germany, it must be admitted that they do not use them as frequently as we might expect, had they been created for this end. In that most grisly and ghastly waxwork exhibition at Florence, representing a charnel-house filled with the recent victims to a raging plague, in every stage of decomposition, the toad and his stool are not forgotten; but the artist, who had here to deal with matter, and to consult what it would bear, has not put his toads upon these brittle stools, lest, giving way, both should come to the ground; he has been content to convert them into toad-umbrellas, and to spread them as an awning over their heads.[15]
THE RANGE OF FUNGUS GROWTHS.
The family of Funguses, in the comprehensive sense in which we now employ the term, is immense. Merely catalogued and described, there are sufficient to fill an octavo volume of nearly 400 pages of close print, of British species alone; altogether, there cannot be less than 5000 recognized species at present known, and each year adds new ones to the list. The reader’s surprise at this will somewhat diminish, when he considers, that not only the toadstools which beset his walks, whether growing upon the ground or at the roots of trees, belong to this class, but that the immense hordes of parasites which feed at his expense, and foul, like the Harpies, whatever they may not actually consume, belong to it also.
For the single mushroom that we eat, how many hundreds there be that retaliate and prey upon us in return! To enumerate but a few, and these of the microscopic kinds (on the other side are some which the arms can scarcely embrace): the _Mucor mucedo_, that spawns upon our dried preserves; the _Ascophora mucedo_, that makes our bread mouldy (“mucidæ frustra farinæ”[16]); the _Uredo segetum_, that burns Ceres out of her own cornfields; the _Uredo rubigo_, whose rust is still more destructive; and the _Puccinia graminis_, whose voracity sets corn-laws and farmers at defiance, are all funguses! So is the grey _Monilia_, that rots, and then fattens upon, our fruits; and the _Mucor herbariorum_, that destroys the careful gleanings of the painstaking botanist. When our beer becomes mothery, the mother of that mischief is a fungus. If pickles acquire a bad taste, if ketchup turns ropy and putrifies, funguses have a finger in it all! Their reign stops not here; they prey upon each other; they even select their victims! There is the _Myrothecium viride_, which will only grow upon dry Agarics, preferring chiefly, for this purpose, the _Agaricus adustus_; the _Mucor[17] chrysospermus_, which attacks the flesh of a particular _Boletus_; the _Sclerotium cornutum_, which visits some other moist mushrooms in decay. There are some _Xylomas_ that will spot the leaves of the Maple, and some those of the Willow, exclusively. The naked seeds of some are found burrowing between the opposite surface of leaves; some love the neighbourhood of burnt stubble and charred wood; some visit the sculptor in his studio, growing up amidst the heaps of moistened marble dust that have caked and consolidated under his saw. The _Racodium_ of the low cellar[18] festoons its ceiling, shags its walls, and wraps its thick coat round our wine-casks,[19] keeping our oldest wine in closest bond; while the _Geastrum_, aspiring occasionally to leave this earth, has been found suspended, like Mahomet’s coffin, between it and the stars, on the very highest pinnacle of St. Paul’s.[20] The close cavities of nuts occasionally afford concealment to some species; others, like leeches, stick to the bulbs of plants, and suck them dry; these (the architect’s and ship-builder’s bane) pick timber to pieces, as men pick oakum; nor do they confine their selective ravages to plants alone, they attach themselves to animal structures, and destroy animal life; the _Onygena equina_ has a particular fancy for the hoofs of horses and for the horns of cattle, sticking to these alone; the belly of a tropical fly[21] is liable, in autumn, to break out into vegetable tufts of fungous growth, and the caterpillar to carry about on his body a _Cordyceps_ larger than himself. The disease called Muscadine, which destroys so many silkworms, is also a fungus (_Botrytis Bassiana_), which in a very short time completely fills the worm with filaments very unlike those it is in the habit of secreting.[22] The vegetating wasp,[23] too, of which everybody has heard, is only another mysterious blending of vegetable with insect life. Lastly, and to take breath, funguses visit the wards of our hospitals, and grow out of the products of surgical disease.[24] Where, then, are they not to be found? do they not abound, like Pharaoh’s plagues, everywhere? is not their name legion, and their province ubiquity?[25]
OF THEIR GENERAL FORMS, COLOURS, TEXTURE, TASTES, SMELLS, ETC.
What geometry shall define their ever-varying shapes? who but a Venetian painter do justice to their colours?[26] or what modifications of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ convey an adequate knowledge of all their various crases and consistencies? As to shapes, some are simple threads, like the _Byssus_, and never get beyond this; some shoot out into branches, like seaweed; some puff themselves out into puff-balls; some thrust their heads into mitres;[27] these assume the shape of a cup,[28] and those of a wine-funnel;[29] some, like _A. mammosus_, have a teat; others, like the _A. clypeolarius_, are umbonated at their centre; these are stilted upon a high leg,[30] and those have not a leg to stand on; some are shell-shaped, many bell-shaped, and some hang upon their stalks like a lawyer’s wig;[31] some assume the form of the horse’s hoof, others of a goat’s beard: in _Clathrus cancellatus_ you look into the fungus through a thick red trellis which surrounds it. Some exhibit a nest in which they rear their young,[32] and, not to speak of those vague shapes,
“If shapes they can be called, that shape have none Determinate,”
of such tree parasites as are fain to mould themselves at the will of their entertainer (the fate of parasites, whether under oak or mahogany), mention may be made of two, of which the forms are at once singular and constant; one exactly like an ear, and given for some good reason to Judas (_Auricula Judæ_), clings to several trees, and trembles when you touch it; the other, which lolls out from the bark of chestnut-trees (_Lingua di Castagna_), is so like a tongue in shape and general appearance,[33] that in the days of enchanted trees you would not have cut it off to pickle or to eat on any account, lest the knight to whom it belonged should afterwards come to claim it of you. The above are amongst the most remarkable of the many Protean forms assumed by funguses; as to their colours, we find in one genus only species which correspond to every hue! The _Agaricus Cæsareus_, the _A. muscarius_, the _A. sanguineus_, assume the imperial purple, the _A. violaceus_ a beautiful violet, the _A. sulphureus_ a bright yellow, the _A. adustus_ a dingy black, the _A. exquisitus_, and many others, a milk-white; whilst the _A. virescens_ takes that which, in this class of plants, is the rarest of all to meet with, a pale-green colour. The upper surface of some is zoned with concentric circles of different hues; sometimes it is spotted, at other times of a uniform tint. The bonnets of some shine as if they were sprinkled with _mica_;[34] these have a rich velvety, those a smooth kid-like covering stretched over them. Some _pilei_ are imbricated with brown scales, some flocked with white shreds of membrane, and some are stained with various-coloured milks secreted from within. The consistence of funguses is very different according to their sort, and the epithets of woody, corky, leathery, spongy, fleshy, gelatinous, pulpy, or mucous, will all find fitting application to some of them. Occasionally a fungus is secreted soft, but hardens by degrees into a compact and woody texture.
ODOURS AND TASTES.
Both one and the other are far more numerous in this class of plants than in any other with which we are acquainted. As to odours, though these be generally most powerful in the fresh condition of the fungus, they are sometimes increased by drying it, during which process too some species, inodorous before, acquire an odour, and not always a pleasant one. Some yield an insupportable stench; the _Phallus impudicus_ and _Clathrus cancellatus_ are of this kind. A botanist had by mistake taken one of the former into his bedroom; he was soon awakened by an intolerable fœtor, and was glad to open his window and get rid of it, as he hoped, and the _Phallus_ together. Here he was disappointed; “sublatâ causâ non tollitur effectus,” the fœtor remaining nearly the same for some hours afterwards. A lady, a friend of mine, who was drawing one in a room, was obliged to take it into the open air to complete her sketch. As to the _Clathrus_, I have found ten minutes in a room with it nine too many: it becomes insupportably offensive in a short time, and its infective stench has given rise to a superstition entertained of it throughout the Landes, viz. that it is capable of producing cancer—in consequence of which superstition the inhabitants, who call it Cancrou, or Cancer, cover it carefully over, lest by accident some one should chance to touch it, and become infected with that horrible disease in consequence.[35] Batsch has described an Agaric[36] of so powerful and peculiar a smell, that before he could finish his picture (for he was drawing it) a violent headache made him desist, “vehementi afficiebar capitis dolore.” Of the others, some are graveolent in a savoury or in an unsavoury sense. This smells strong of onions,[37] that of cinnamon,[38] from which it takes its name; the _A. ostreatus_ (_auct. nost._) most powerfully of Tarragon; _A. odoratus_, and the _Cantharellus_, like apricots and ratafia (Purton); _Boletus salicinus_, “like the bloom of May” (Abbott); the _A. sanguineus_, when dry, savours of a stale poultice; _A. piperatus_, of the _Triglia_, or red mullet; the _Hydna_ generally give out a smell of tallow; moulds have their own smells, which are mouldy and musty; some exhale the smell of putrid meat, many the odour of fresh meal; the spawn of _A. prunulus_ and of the puff-balls (_Lycoperdons_) exhale an odour similar to the perfect plants; but the _Pietra funghaia_, filled with the spores of its own _Polyporus_, is without smell. When fresh, there is scarcely any perceptible odour in _Boletus edulis_ or _B. luridus_, nor yet in the _A. Cæsareus_ when recently gathered. A word about their tastes will suffice: with so many smells, they must needs have flavours to correspond, and so they have; sapid, sweet, sour, peppery, rich, rank, acrid, nauseous, bitter, styptic, might be all found in an English “gradus” (though at present, I am sorry to say, without any lines from poets in whose writings they occur), after the word ‘Fungus.’ In a few, generally of an unsafe character, there is little or no taste in the mouth while they are being masticated, but shortly after deglutition, the fauces become dry, and a sense of more or less constriction is apt to supervene, which frequently continues for some time afterwards.
EXPANSIVE POWER OF GROWTH.
Soft and yielding as vegetable structures appear to the touch, the expansive force of their growth is almost beyond calculation. The effects of this power, of which the experience of every one will furnish him with some instances, are perhaps nowhere more strikingly exemplified than amidst the ruins of its own creation. Coeval with many old brick fabrics of earlier times, perhaps embedded in the very mortar which holds them together, it may lurk there for centuries in quiescence, till once arousing its energies, it continues to exert them in ceaseless activity ever after. It has at Rome planted its pink Valerians on her highest towers, and its wild fig-tree in the breaches of her walls; nor are the granite obelisks of her piazzas, nor the classic groups in marble on her Quirinal mount, entirely exempt from its encroachments. A conspiracy of plants, _one hundred strong_, have long ago planned the destruction of the Coliseum; their undermining process advances each year, and neither iron nor new brickwork can arrest it long. That old Roman cement, which the barbarians gave up as impracticable, and the pickaxe of the Barberini had but begun to disintegrate, will, ere the lapse of another century, be effectually pulled to pieces by the rending arm of vegetation. Here, as erst in Juvenal’s time, the _mala ficus_ finds no walls too strong to rive asunder, no tower beyond the reach of its scaling, no monument too sacred for it to touch. In the class of plants immediately under consideration, while the expansive effort of growth is equal to what it is in other cases, its effects are far more startling from their suddenness. M. Bulliard (to cite one or two instances out of a great many) relates, that on placing a _Phallus impudicus_ within a glass vessel, the plant expanded so rapidly as to shiver its sides with an explosive detonation as loud as that of a pistol. Dr. Carpenter, in his ‘Elements of Physiology,’ mentions that “in the neighbourhood of Basingstoke a paving-stone, measuring twenty-one inches square, and weighing eighty-three pounds, was completely raised an inch and a half out of its bed by a mass of toadstools, of from six to seven inches in diameter, and that nearly the whole pavement of the town suffered displacement from the same cause.” A friend has seen a crop of puff-balls raise large flagstones considerably above the plane of their original level; and I have myself recently witnessed an extensive displacement of the pegs of a wooden pavement which had been driven nine inches into the ground, but were heaved up irregularly, in several places, by small bouquets of Agarics, growing from below.
REPRODUCTIVE POWER.
Funguses have a remarkable power of re-forming such parts of their substance as have been accidentally or otherwise removed. Vittadini found that when the tubes of a _Boletus_ were cut out from a growing plant, they were after a time reproduced. Where deep holes have been eaten into these plants by snails, such holes, on the _Boletus_ attaining to its full growth, are partially refilled. If the tender _Polyporus_ be cut across, the wound immediately sets about healing by the first intention, leaving not even a cicatrice to mark the original seat of the injury. The _Lycoperdons_ (_Bovista_), which are often accidentally wounded by the scythe, have the same faculty of repairing the injury, remodelling afresh the parts that may have been excised from them.[39]
MOTION.
In a recent work on ‘Insect Life,’ I have discoursed somewhat at large on the insufficiency of any kind of movements as proofs of sensation, quoting, amidst other evidences to this effect, certain remarkable movements in plants. Some of the present family exhibit the phenomena of insensitive motion in a remarkable manner, and might have been added to the list already cited in that publication. Mr. Robson has given us a very interesting account of the movements he observed in the scarlet _Clathrus_, which is here transcribed in his own words. It is interesting to notice how an unbiassed observer uses the very terms to designate the movements of a plant which would have been minutely descriptive of those of an insect:—“At first I was much surprised to see a part of the fibres, that had got through a rupture in the top of the _Clathrus_, moving like the legs of a fly when laid on his back. I then touched it with the point of a pin, and was still more surprised when I saw it present the appearance of a little bundle of worms entangled together, the fibres being all alive. I next took the little bundle of fibres quite out, and the animal motion was then so strong as to turn the head halfway round, first one way and then another, and two or three times it got out of the focus. Almost every fibre had a different motion; some of them twined round one another, and then untwined again, whilst others were bending, extending, coiling, waving, etc. The fibres had many little balls adhering to their sides, which I take to be the seeds, and I observed many of them to be disengaged at every motion of the fibres; the seeds appeared like gunpowder finely granulated.” Instances from other authors abound. “An _Helvella inflata_, on being touched by me once, threw up its seeds in the form of a smoke, which arose with an elastic bound, glittering in the sunshine like particles of silver.”[40] “The _Vibrissea truncorum_, taken from water and exposed to the rays of the sun, though at first smooth, is soon covered with white geniculated filaments, which start from the _hymenium_, and have an oscillating motion.”[41] The _Pilobolus_, of which so accurate an account has been given us by the great Florentine mycologist,[42] casts, as its name imports, its seeds into the air; these also escape with a strong projectile force from the upper surface of Pezizas, the anfractuosities of the Morel, and from the gills of Agarics.[43]
PHOSPHORESCENCE.
Several kinds of funguses, and the spawn of the truffle, emit a phosphorescent light; of the first, the _Agaricus olearius_, not uncommon in Italy, is sometimes seen at night, feebly shining amidst the darkness of the olive grove. The coal-mines near Dresden have long been celebrated for the production of funguses which emit a light similar to a pale moonlight. Mr. Drummond describes an Australian fungus with similar properties; and another very interesting one, an Agaric, is noticed by Mr. Gardner, in his ‘Travels in Brazil.’[44]
DIMENSIONS.
Most funguses do not present great anomalies in their size, but retain nearly the same dimensions throughout the whole course of their being; some few species, however, seem to have a faculty of almost indefinite expansion. The usual size of a puff-ball, as we all know, is not much larger than an egg, but some puff-balls attain to the dimensions of the human head,[45] or exceed it. Mr. Berkeley quotes the case of a _Polyporus squamosus_, which in three weeks grew to seven feet five inches in periphery, and weighed thirty-four pounds; also of a _Polyporus fraxineus_, which in a few years measured forty-two inches across. Clusius[46] tells us of a fungus in Pannonia, of such immense size, that after satisfying the cravings of a large mycophilous household, enough of it remained to fill a chariot; this must have been the _Polyporus frondosus_, to which _Polyporus_ John Bapt. Porta[47] also alludes as that called _gallinace_[48] by the Neapolitans, which is so big, he says, that you can scarcely make your hands meet round it, “brachiis diductis vix homo complecti possit;” he had known it attain twelve pounds weight in a few days.[49] Bolton, in 1787, found an _Agaricus muscarius_, which, “after the removal of a considerable portion of its stalk, weighed nearly two pounds;” Withering, an _A. Georgii_, “which weighed fourteen pounds,” and Mr. Stackhouse another of the same species in Cornwall, “which was eighteen inches across, and had a stem as thick as a man’s wrist;” and I lately picked in the park at Buckhurst, a _Boletus edulis_ which measured twenty-eight inches round its pileus, and eight round the stem, and a few days later a _B. pachypus_, the girth of which was thirty-two inches.
CHEMICAL COMPOSITION.
Of all vegetable productions these are the most highly azotized, that is, animalized in their composition—a fact not only evinced by the strong cadaverous smell which some of them give out in decay, and by the savoury animalized meat which others afford at table, but on the evidence of chemistry also. Thus Dr. Marcet has proved that, like animals, they absorb a large quantity of oxygen, and disengage in return, from their surface, a large quantity of carbonic acid; all however do not exhale carbonic acid, but, in lieu of it, some give out hydrogen, and others azotic gas. They yield, moreover, to chemical analysis the several components of which animal structures are made up; many of them, in addition to sugar, gum, resin, a peculiar acid called fungic acid, and a variety of salts, furnish considerable quantities of _albumen_, _adipocire_, and _osmazome_, which last is that principle that gives its peculiar flavour to meat gravy. The _Polyporus sulphureus_ is frequently covered with little crystals of the binoxalate of potash;[50] the _Agaricus piperatus_ yields the acetate of potash,[51] and it is probable that other funguses of which we have as yet no recorded analysis will, on the institution of such, be found to contain some new and unexpected ingredient peculiar to themselves. When these several substances have been duly extracted from funguses, there is left behind for a common base the solid structure of the plant itself; this, which is called _fungine_, is white, flabby, insipid in its taste, but highly nutritious in its properties. If nitric acid be poured upon it, an immediate disengagement of azotic gas takes place, and several new substances are the result: a bitter principle, a reddish resinoid matter, hydrocyanic and oxalic acids, and two remarkable fatty substances, whereof one resembles tallow, the other wax. If dilute sulphuric acid be poured upon this fungine, no change ensues; but if muriatic acid be substituted, the result is a jelly.
USES.