SUBJECTS of wild surmise and peculiar beliefs, fungi play a
part in almost every branch of natural history. They have been the prime, life-long interest of Dr. Ramsbottom, for many years Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum, who has studied them in every practical form and brought to the light of day many historical allusions buried in old treatises: no one else could have written this book, which I am sure will became a classic. Dr. Ramsbottom com- bines style and humour with his learning, and cleverly intersperses technical material with old tales and intriguing facts, so that the layman's interest is fed and the knowledge of the more expert is expanded. For the curious here are details of edibility and poisonousness, with the intermediate power of intoxication; details of cultivation, reminiscences of truffle-hunters, explanations of luminosity and fairy rings, expositions of the more extraordinary forms among toad- stools. For the more technical there are details of morphology, sex and habitats, accounts of dry rot and penicillin, The vol- ume is completed with eighty colour illustra- tions of individual fungi, of the highest quality, as well as numerous half-tones. The mycologist and the toadstool-hunting amateur cannot do without this book, and it should appeal too to anyone who has ever felt inquisitive about - these peculiar and ubiquitous growths, the fungi. A. J. H.
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