ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD "MUSHROOM."

Various opinions have been offered as to the derivation of the word "mushroom." According to Hay, it probably had its origin in a combination of the two Welsh words maes, a field, and rhum, a knob, which by gradual corruption have become mushroom. Some writers on the other hand regard it as a corruption of mousseron, a name specifically applied by the French to those mushrooms which are found growing in mossy places. But it seems to be of older usage than such a derivation would imply, and therefore the first explanation seems the more likely to be correct.

In England the term "mushroom" has been most commonly applied to the "meadow mushroom," that being the one best known; but English-speaking mycologists now apply it generically very much as the French do the term "champignon," while the name "champignon" is restricted in England to the Marasmius oreades, or "Fairy Ring" mushroom.

Berkeley says the French word "champignon" was originally scarcely of wider signification than our word "mushroom," though now classical in the sense of fleshy fungi generally. The German word Pilz (a corruption of Boletus) is used to denote the softer kinds by some German authors. Constant and Dufour, in their recently published Atlas des Champignons, include types of a great variety of mushrooms.

Hay contends that the pernicious nick-name "toad-stool" has not the derivation supposed, but that the first part of the word is the Saxon or old English "tod," meaning a bunch, cluster, or bush, the form of many terrestrial fungi suggesting it. The second syllable, "stool," is easily supplied. "The erroneous idea of connecting toads with these plants," says Hay, "seems to be due to Spenser, or to some poet, possibly, before his time." Spenser speaks of the loathed paddocks, "paddock" then being the name given in England to the frog, afterwards corrupted to "paddic," and once received, readily converted by the Scotch into "puddick-stool." It would seem, therefore, from the foregoing, that the term "toad-stool" can have no proper relation to mushrooms, whether edible or poisonous.

The three mushrooms illustrated and described in this pamphlet, Plates I, II, and III, are of the order Agaricini or gilled mushrooms. They are well-defined types and of wide geographical distribution.