Part 3
The uses to which funguses have been put are various, and, had the properties of these plants been as extensively investigated as those which belong to the phanerogamic classes, they would probably by this time have proved still more numerous: some, as the _Polyporus sulphureus_, furnish a useful colour for dyeing;[52] the _Agaricus atramentarius_ makes ink; divers Lycoperdons, of which other mention will be made presently when we come to speak of such species as are esculent, have also been employed for stupefying bees, for stanching blood, and for making tinder; their employment in the first of these capacities, seems to have escaped the observation of the accurate author of ‘Les Jardins,’ who has mentioned the others:—
“Ce puissant Agaric, qui du sang épanché Arrête les ruisseaux, et dont le sein fidèle Du caillou pétillant recueille l’étincelle.”
The ‘caillou,’ alas, like the poet who struck this spark out of it, is now obsolete; but _amadou_ is still in vogue, being employed for many household purposes; in addition to which, a medical practitioner of Covent Garden has of late been in the habit of using extensive sheets of it to cover over and protect the backs of those bedridden invalids whose cruel sufferings make such large demands upon our sympathy,—for the alleviation of which so little is to be done!—as it is more elastic than chamois leather, it is less liable to crumple up when lain upon, and on this account has been preferred to it by several of our metropolitan surgeons of eminence; some employ it also as a gentle compress over varicose veins, where it supports the distended vessels without pressing too tightly upon the limb. Gleditsch relates, that the poorer inhabitants of Franconia stitch it together, and make dresses of it; and also that the Laplanders burn it in the neighbourhood of their dwellings, to secure their reindeer from the attacks of gadflies, which are repelled by the smoke; thus “good at need,” it really deserves the epithet of ‘puissant,’ given to it by Delille.[53]
The _Polyporus squamosus_ makes a razor-strop far superior to any of those at present patented, and sold, with high-sounding epithets, far beyond their deserts. To prepare the _Polyporus_ for this purpose, it must be cut from the ash-tree in autumn, when its juices have been dried and its substance has become consolidated; it is then to be flattened out for twenty-four hours in a press, after which it should be carefully rubbed with pumice, sliced longitudinally, and every slip that is free from the erosions of insects be then glued upon a wooden stretcher. Cesalpinus knew all this! and the barbers in his time knew it too;[54] and it is not a little remarkable that so useful an invention should, in an age of puffing, advertisement, and improvement, like our own, have been entirely lost sight of. Imperato employed and recommends it as an excellent detergent, with which to brush and comb out the scurf from the hair.
The _Agaricus muscarius_ is largely employed in Kamtchatka, in decoction with the _Epilobium angustifolium_, as an intoxicating liquor.[55] The Laplanders smear it on the walls and bedposts of their dwellings, to destroy bugs (Linn.); and Clusius relates, that it is sold extensively in the market at Frankfort, to poison flies; for this purpose, it is either cut into small pieces and thrown about the premises, or else boiled in milk and placed upon the window-sills; in either case it is vastly inferior in efficacy to that celebrated “mort aux mouches,” the impure oxide of cobalt, that is, to the arsenic which this contains. The above are a few of the uses, exclusive of the esculent or medical ones, to which funguses have been put; it is fair, however, to notice that they maintain a debtor, as well as a creditor, account with mankind, in which the balance seems to be occasionally quite against us; those that are most injurious are generally, as has been already stated, of the microscopic kinds; whereof some attack young plants still underground, emulging them completely of their juices, in consequence of which they perish; others, like the corn-blights, permit the plant to attain maturity before they begin their work of destruction, and destroy it just as it is beginning to fructify.[56] The fearful epidemics to which grain so infected has given rise are well known, though it is still a matter of question whether the ergoted corn owes its unwholesome qualities to the injury which it had sustained from the blight, or to the blight itself. Though the mischief produced by parasitic funguses be unquestionably great, this occasional and very partial evil is more than compensated by the much greater amount of good accomplished solely by their agency, in the assistance they afford to the decomposition of animal and vegetable tissues, which has procured for them the name, not unaptly applied, of “nature’s scavengers.” This decomposition they effect by assimilating, through the medium of their radicles, the juices of the decaying structure in which they are developed, loosening thereby its cohesion, and causing it to break up into a rapid dissolution of its parts.[57]
MEDICAL USES.
Of the funguses formerly employed in medicine few are now in vogue; the ergot of rye still keeps its ground, and in cases of protracted labour, when judiciously employed, is valuable in assisting nature when unequal to the necessary efforts of parturition. Another fungus, formerly much in fashion, though now put on the shelf, seems really to deserve further trial; I mean the _Polyporus suaveolens_ (Linn.), which in that most intractable disease, tubercular consumption, surely claims to be tried when there are such respectable authorities to vouch for its surprising effects, in cases where everything else had been notoriously unsuccessful.[58] Sartorius was the first to prescribe it as a remedy in phthisis, and its employment with this view, since his day, has at various times been præconized on the Continent; the dose generally recommended being a scruple of the powder two or three times a day. Of the cases published by Professors Schmidel and Wendst (which have an air of good faith in their recital, well entitling them to consideration), I abridge one as an example, though the others are not less interesting; and while it is certainly to be regretted that the absence of stethoscopic indications should prevent our having any positive evidence as to the precise condition of the diseased lung, or of the nature of the secretion expectorated, still, even supposing them to be simple cases of chronic bronchitis, with marasmus the efficacy of the remedy is scarcely less striking or instructive. “A young man, ætat. twenty-one, was seized at the beginning of autumn with inflammatory cough and hæmoptysis, which were partially subdued by V. S. and the ordinary antiphlogistic treatment; but the cough, coming on again with renewed severity during the winter, was accompanied with the expuition of glairy mucus, which was sometimes specked with blood. Towards the spring the young man had become much thinner, and was continuing to waste away; the expectoration also had changed its colour, and had become fetid and green; his nights were feverish and disturbed; he had no desire for food, and ate but little; his ankles had begun to swell; he had copious night-sweats and diarrhœa. A teaspoonful of an electuary of the _P. suaveolens_ in honey was given him three times a day, and _nothing else_; and, extraordinary as it may appear, under this treatment the sweats speedily began to diminish with the cough, and after a three months’ continuance of the medicine the patient entirely recovered.”[59]
The _Polyporus laricis_, the so-called Agaric of pharmacy, is a powerful but most uncertain medicine, and has been also recommended in consumption. I once administered a few grains of it in this disease, when violent pains and hypercatharsis supervened, which lasted for several hours. MM. B. Lagrange and Braconnot found it to contain a large quantity of an acrid resin, to which it no doubt owes its hypercathartic properties. To judge from this single case, which, however, tallies with the experience of others, I should say that this fungus was, in medicine, to be looked upon as a very suspicious ally.[60] The _A. muscarius_ has also been used in medicine. Whistling, so long ago as 1778, wrote on its healing virtues, in Latin, recommending its powder as a valuable application with which to sprinkle sanious sores and excoriated nipples. Plenck gave drachm doses of it internally in epilepsy, and, together with Bernhard and Whistling, attests its success. It appears that the _Phallus mucus_ in China, and the _Lycoperdon carcinomale_ near the Cape of Good Hope, are used also by the inhabitants of those countries as external applications for cancerous sores. The _Phallus_, rubbed upon the skin, is said to deaden its sensibility, like the _narke_, or electric skate.
FUNGUSES CONSIDERED AS AN ARTICLE OF DIET.
If all the good things ever said about the stomach since the days of Menenius Agrippa, or before his time, could be collected, they would doubtless form an interesting volume; Aretæus has somewhere quaintly, but not unaptly, called it the “house of Plato;” in another place he speaks of it as the “seat” (as if κατ’ ἐξοχὴν) “of pleasure and of pain;” and so it is indeed, and it has moreover a notorious tendency, when provoked, to cool our charity and to heat our blood; its sympathies by nervous attachments, both of “continuity” and of “contiguity,”[61] with the other organs of the body, are extensive and complicated; no wonder then that it should have enlisted ours in its behalf, and that few of us would offend it wittingly, though by indiscretions we do offend it continually.
In the “sensual philosophy,” of the French school particularly, the stomach has received marked attention, ranking in that country as the most noble of the _viscera_.[62] Even in those republican times when no other rights were held sacred throughout France, the privileges of the stomach were respected; when men found that they might get on quite as well, or better, with a bad heart, but that they could not get on so well without a good digestion, it is not so much to be wondered at if they made idols of their bellies, established a School of Cooks to rival the School of Athens, and became famous for “those charming little suppers in which they used to set the decencies of life at defiance.”[63] But if in France far too much attention has been paid to the culinary art, too little attention has surely been paid to it at home; for the art of cookery, properly understood, is not only the art of pleasing the palate, but the stomach also.[64] In France, the dinner is the thought of the morning, and sometimes the business of the day, but in France everybody dines; in England, where the word ‘dinner’ never occurs till it is announced, a few wealthy men dine well, the middling ranks badly, and the poor not at all. Not that even the poorer orders generally want the necessary materials for such repast; they frequently consume more butcher’s meat than is consumed by their Continental neighbours; it is simply that they want skill in preparing it. If it be scanty, they cannot tell how to make the most of it; if it be homely, they cannot tell how to improve its flavour by uniting and blending with it a certain class of inexpensive luxuries, which, though they grow everywhere throughout the country, are everywhere neglected. Touching the wholesomeness or unwholesomeness of these, I have now a few words to address to the common-sense reader; that is, to him who prefers feasting upon funguses to fasting out of mere prejudice. Formerly men used to refer such questions as this to their physician; they would
“Try what Mead or Cheselden advised.”[65]
intending, perhaps, to take some little poetical license with it afterwards. Abernethy, on the anecdote of the oysters and oyster-shells being duly substantiated, would have been _ostracized_ from polite society in those days of decorous etiquette, when, as medical men affected to be more _dientereumatic_ with the insides of their patients than any of us now pretend to be, they must needs have been far more affable when consulted on such cases than we of the present day might be; though they did not therefore always answer the same question in the same way; one, for instance, “Le médecin Tant Pis,” would frequently _proscribe_ the very things that his rival, “Le médecin Tant Mieux,” had just been recommending. When men came to find they must either give up some favourite article of food or else give up the anathema pronounced against it, they generally preferred the latter course, and were sure, to use a medical phrase, to “do well” if they did so; whilst a few wretched hypochondriacs, adopting the other alternative, and living strictly _en régime_, became only the more hypochondriacal for their pains.
None but a determined theorist[66] would nowadays think of prescribing diet for the stomach of a single patient, far less for all those of a polygastric public; neither does an enlightened, self-educated public, that can read Liebig and thoroughly appreciate its own case, hold out much encouragement for such advice. The day is past without return for long-winded prose epic on indigestion; a livelier mode of dealing with the subject of _non-naturals_, in the shape of novels and romances, has won the public ear. Broussais’ five-act tragedy of ‘Gastro-Enteritis’[67] has received its last plaudits; already has Crabbe’s _euthanasia_ to this class of authors attained its full accomplishment:—
“Ye tedious triflers, Truth’s destructive foes, Ye sons of Fiction clad in stupid prose, O’erweening teachers, who, yourselves in doubt, Light up false fires and send us far about, Long may the spider round your pages spin, Subtle and slow, her emblematic gin. Buried in dust and lost in silence dwell, Most potent, dull, and reverend friends, farewell!”
No article of diet was ever half so roughly handled as the fungus. What diatribes against it might be cited from the works of Athenæus, Dioscorides, Galen, Pliny, the Arabian physicians, and all their commentators! What terrible recitals, too, of poisoning from some few species have been industriously circulated, and the unfavourable inference drawn from these, been applied to the whole tribe—a mistake which some writers, even in modern times, have perpetuated. Thus, Kirker votes the whole “a family of malignants;”[68] thus too Allen and Batarra pen unsolicited _apages_,[69] and warn us, in an especial manner, to beware of them; while Scopoli includes in his very definition of a fungus, that it is of a class of plants which are always to be suspected, and which are for the most part poisonous. Tertullian, with more of epigram than of truth, makes out, that for every different hue they display there is a pain to correspond to it, and just so many modes of death as there are distinct species;[70] to all which, and a great deal more similar rhapsody and invective, tens of thousands of our Continental neighbours in the daily habit of eating nothing else but funguses might reply, in the words of Plautus—
“Adeone me fuisse _fungum_ ut qui illis crederem?”
Those who abuse funguses generally do so from prejudice rather than from personal experience, objecting to their flesh as being heavy of digestion, and to their juices as being more or less prejudicial to health. Some say they are too rich, others of too heating a character. These objections are for the most part without foundation, as those who eat them can abundantly testify. To quote the authority of one or two medical friends on the Continent, formed on large personal experience, in favour of the excellence of this diet, Professors Puccinelli of Lucca, Briganti of Naples, Sanguinetti of Rome, Ottaviani of Urbino, Viviani of Genoa, are all consumers of funguses. Vittadini, whose excellent work on the esculent kinds of Italy is without a rival, himself eats, and gives us ample receipts for dressing them. In France, a similar service has been rendered to the public by Paulet, Persoon, Cordier, and Roques,[71] who have severally published excellent treatises on the various kinds fit for food, as they occur in the different provinces; whilst the influence of the last winter has been the means of introducing several new species into the Parisian markets, thus causing them to be very generally known. Not to multiply individual testimony needlessly, let that of Schwægrichen suffice, who tells us, that on seeing the peasants about Nuremberg eating _raw_ mushrooms,[72] he too, for several weeks, restricted himself entirely to this diet, “eating with them nothing but bread, and drinking nothing but water, when, instead of finding his health impaired, he rather experienced an increase of strength.” _Vegetior evasit!_ as the inscription at Rome relates to have been the case with St. John when he emerged, after one hour’s cooking, from a caldron of boiling oil. In a word, that which has been the daily bread of nations—the poor man’s manna—for many centuries, cannot be an unwholesome, much less a dangerous food.[73] Funguses, no doubt, are a rich and dainty fare; and so whatever objections apply to made-dishes _in genere_ may apply also to these, which, while they contain all the sapid and nutritious constituents of animal food, have however an advantage over it—viz. that while they are as rich in gravy as any butcher’s meat, their texture is more tender, and their specific gravity less. Touching the general question as to the wholesomeness of made-dishes, it might perhaps be stated as a rule, to which there are many exceptions, that the more we vary and combine food, the better chance there is of our digesting it.[74] “You must assist nature,” Hippocrates says, “by art. You must vary your viands and your drinks. Music would tire if it were always to the same tune, so also does a monotonous regimen tire.[75] Cooks therefore make _mixed_ dishes, and he who should always make the same dish would deservedly pass for not being a cook at all.”[76] And though Sydenham, in apparent discordance with this, recommends _one_ dish for dinner, it is quite for another reason. Plain food may indeed suit some stomachs, but good cooking suits all stomachs; and when Seneca writes, that “there are as many diseases as cooks,” Roques takes him up properly by replying, “Yes; as bad cooks.” The rule for every dinner, plain or compound, is to dress it well—“that which is best administered is best;” and good cooking, thus understood as the art of improving and of making the most of a thing, is a matter of equal importance to both rich and poor. It is a safe rule, I believe, and one recommended on good authority too, if men wanted authority on such matter, to eat what they like, but not as much of it as they like.[77] Nine-tenths of dyspeptics become so from overfeeding. “Nauseosa satietas non ex crassis et pravis solum, sed etiam boni succi alimentis provenit.” Even Paracelsus, though an undoubted quack, might give some people a hint: “Dosis sola facit ut venenum sit vel non; cibus enim vel potus qualibet quantitate majore æquo assumtus venenum fit.” Dyspeptics are willing to enlist your sympathies in their behalf by telling of the delicacy of their mucous membrane, just as young countesses descant with more success on the extreme susceptibility of their nerves; nor is it always kindly received, if a well-wisher should remind them that their sufferings may not after all have been the fault either of their stomach or of the dish which they blame, but of their own indiscreet use of both. Whilst it is an acknowledged fact on all hands that infants are overfed, and that all children overfeed, men are by no means so prone or willing to admit that gluttony is perhaps the very last of childish things that they are in the habit of putting away from them. Thus, then, though funguses are not to be considered unwholesome, they are, like other good things, to be eaten with discretion and not _à discrétion_. “If you live an indolent life, are a sybarite in your heart, or should some violent passions (choler, jealousy, or revenge) be dealing with you, take care in such a case how you eat ragouts of truffles or of mushrooms; but if, on the contrary, your health be good, your life temperately prudent, your temper even, and your mind serene, then (provided you like them) you may eat of these luxuries without the slightest apprehension of their disagreeing with you.” M. Roques adds, and with truth, “it is the wine, surcharged with alcohol, of which men drink largely, in order, as they say, to relish and digest their mushrooms and made-dishes, that disagrees with the stomach, and that will, ere long, produce those visceral obstructions, and those nephritic ailments, at once so grievous to bear and so difficult to get rid of.”[78] If the reader shall retain _one_ word of the following homely lines, and that word the last, so as to remember it in place, he will owe us no fee, and it will save him many a bitter draught:—
Lies the last meal all undigested still? Does chyle impure your poisoned lacteals fill? Does Gastrodynia’s tiny gimlet bore, Where the crude load obstructs the rigid door? Or does the fiery heartburn flay your throat? Do darkling specks before your eyeballs float? Do fancied sounds invade your startled ear? Does the stopt heart oft wake to pulseless fear? Your days all listless, and your nights all dream, Of Pustule, Ecchymose, and Emphyseme; Till ruthless surgeon shall your paunch explore, And mark each spot with mischief mottled o’er; Does all you suffer quite surpass belief? Has oft-tried soda ceased to give relief? Has bismuth failed, nor tonics eased your pain? Have Chambers, Watson, both been teased in vain? In case so cross—what cure?—but one: _Refrain_!