"In gathering mushrooms one should be supplied with a sharp knife. The mushrooms should be carefully cut off an inch or so below the cap, or at least sufficiently far above the ground to escape all signs of dirt on the stems. They should then be laid gills upward in their receptacle, and it is well to have a special basket, arranged with one or two removable bottoms or horizontal partitions, which are kept in place by upright props within, thus relieving the lower layers of mushrooms from the weight of those above them. Such a basket is almost indispensible.
"Before preparing mushrooms for the table, the specimens should be carefully scrutinized for a class of fungus specialists which we have not taken into account, and which have probably anticipated us. The mushroom is proverbial for its rapid development, but nature has not allowed it thus to escape the usual penalties of lush vegetation, as witness this swarming, squirming host, minute grubs, which occasionally honey-comb or hollow its entire substance ere it has reached its prime; indeed, in many cases, even before it has fully expanded or even protruded above ground.
"Like the carrion flies, the bees, and wasps, which in early times were believed to be of spontaneous origin—flies being generated from putrefaction, bees from dead bulls, and the martial wasps from defunct "war-horses"—these fungus swarms, which so speedily reduce a fair specimen of a mushroom to a melting loathsome mass, were also supposed to be the natural progeny of the 'poisonous toadstool.' But science has solved the riddle of their mysterious omnipresence among the fungi, each particular swarm of grubs being the witness of a former visit of a maternal parent insect, which has sought the budding fungus in its haunts often before it has fully revealed itself to human gaze, and implanted within its substance her hundred or more eggs. To the uneducated eye these larvæ all appear similar, but the specialist in entomology readily distinguishes between them as the young of this or that species of fly, gnat, or beetle.
"As an illustration of the assiduity with which the history of these tiny scavenger insects has been followed by science, I may mention that in the gnat group alone over seven hundred species have been discovered and scientifically described, many of them requiring a powerful magnifier to reveal their identities.
"Specimens of infected or decaying mushrooms preserved within a tightly closed box—and, we would suggest, duly quarantined—will at length reveal the imago forms of the voracious larvæ; generally a swarm of tiny gnats or flies, with an occasional sprinkling of small glossy black beetles, or perhaps a beautiful indigo-blue insect half an inch in length of most nervous habit, and possessed of a long and very active tail. This insect is an example of the curious group of rove-beetles—staphylinus—a family of insect scavengers, many of whose species depend upon the fungi for subsistence.
