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Updated: June 10, 2025
"I suppose there is scarcely any need of saying," began Kennedy, "that the food which I suspect in this case is the mushrooms. Here I have some which I have fortunately been able to obtain merely to illustrate what I am going to say. This is the deadly Amanita muscaria, the fly-agaric." Madeline Hargrave seemed to be following him with a peculiar fascination.
"Other affairs call me; and, in my absence, that profound knowledge of chemistry, of which I have had evidence in the past, will enable you to follow with intelligent interest the action of these violet rays upon this exceptionally fine specimen of Siberian Amanita muscaria.
Among others, the Czar Alexis of Russia died of eating it. "I have heard that some people find it only a narcotic, and it is said that in Siberia there are actually Amanita debauchees who go on prolonged tears by eating the thing. It may be that it does not affect some people as it does others, but in most cases that beautiful gossamer veil which you see about the stem is really a shroud.
"Some poisonous Amanita got mixed with the edible mushrooms?" Kennedy answered, quickly, without taking his eyes off the line the needle was tracing: "No; this was a case of the deliberate use of the active principle itself, muscarin with the expectation that the death, if the cause was ever discovered, could easily be blamed on such a mushroom.
They answered very well to the eulogistic term of beef marrow applied to them by the mushroom picker who scouted my prudent counsels. I have sometimes employed the mottled amanita, so ill famed in the books, without disastrous result. One of my friends, a doctor, to whom I communicated my ideas about the boiling water treatment, thought that he would make the experiment on his own account.
Once Mary stopped and crushed something under her foot, something white that grew up beside the path. "What was that?" asked Agony curiously. "Deadly amanita," replied Mary. "It's a toadstool a poisonous one." "How can you tell a poisonous toadstool from a harmless one?" asked Agony. "They all look alike to me."
The splendid red and yellow amanita, which lights up a dark spot in the woods like some flowering orchid, is a veritable trap of death. Though human beings have learned the fatal lesson and leave it alone, the poor flies in the woods are ever deceived by its brightness, or odour, and a circle of their bodies upon the ground shows the result of their ignorance.
Webs and gossamers twinkled in the sunlight, and the flaming foliage made a pageant of colour through waning mists where red leaves and yellow fell at every breath along the thinning woods. Beneath trees and hedgerows the ripe mosses gleamed, and coral and amber fungi, with amanita and other hooded folk. In companies and clusters they sprang or arose misshapen, sinister, and alone.
Lake-red colour with liquor potassæ; this liquid filtered gives a precipitate of same colour with nitric acid. =Fungi.= Of the poisonous mushrooms, the Amanita phalloides and the fly agaric, or Agaricus muscarius, are the most potent. The active principle of the former is phallin, and of the latter muscarine. The Agaricus muscarius is bright red with yellow spots.
Neither the maggot nor the even more enterprising Moth ever touches it. In short, whether it be to us a delicious dish or a deadly poison, no amanita is accepted by the grubs. The arion alone sometimes bites at it. The cause of the refusal escapes us.
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