My reasons for writing this book are: First, that Mushroom Culture is but little practised in this country compared to the extent to which it ought to be, considering the abundance of the necessary materials in all parts of these islands, both in town and country, and the high estimation in which the Mushroom is held. I now refer to ordinary Mushroom Culture as practised in our best private gardens. I believe it possible and desirable to extend this, the only phase of the Culture that can be called popular, in a tenfold degree, and that every place in which a gardener and horses are kept should be abundantly supplied with Mushrooms throughout the greater part of the year. Secondly, that although Mushroom Culture as usually practised is perfectly well known to good cultivators, a simpler and fuller account of it than has yet appeared in any English book on the subject is desirable for the unpractised amateur and cultivator. Thirdly, that Mushroom Culture is at present confined to a too narrow groove; and a belief that the general gardening public should have a broad and clear idea of the several ways in which they may procure abundance of excellent Mushrooms with very trifling expense. Even many of the best private growers never think of it except as illustrated on their comparatively small beds in small houses. I believe that if the knowledge of how easily and in how many ways they may be grown, apart from the usual mode, were sufficiently spread, it would lead to the production of many times our present supply. Fourthly, a desire to introduce to this and other countries the system of Mushroom Culture on a very large scale carried on in caverns beneath the environs of Paris, which caverns I visited in 1868.

To these reasons I might add a wish to call attention to the waste of money for Mushroom-spawn that now occurs in nearly every garden. There is not the slightest necessity for this. In every garden where Mushrooms are grown abundance of spawn may be made. Mr. W. P. Ayres writes lately to tell me that in a great midland garden where the spawn bill used to amount to 18l. or 19l. a year, by saving the spawn as the Parisian growers do, all expense for this article is abolished.

I do not attempt to praise or even duly weigh the merits of the Mushroom—that could only be adequately done by the immortal Brillat-Savarin. He, however, seems to have somewhat neglected this most precious of lÉgumes. None but his serious soul could have approached the subject with the necessary solemnity. Nobody but he who first saw the deep dangers of hurried, thoughtless, and irreverent feeding, could have done justice to its exquisite flavour when in the best condition, or could have explained how deliciously it combined the virtues of herb and flesh, unspeakably superior to either. Let us, in passing, quote one of his aphorisms, contributed to form the base Éternelle À la science: “La dÉcouverte d’un mets nouveau fait plus pour le bonheur du genre humain que la dÉcouverte d’une Étoile!”

Now, I do not hesitate to say that the introduction of the Mushroom into our domestic economy in as great a degree as we have it in our power to produce it, would practically be the addition of a new agent in our cuisine, second to none for its delicacy, and unsurpassed for utility. It is true the Mushroom is plentiful in its season, but it is with us, at all seasons when it is not to be gathered in the open air, a luxury to numbers of owners of gardens who have means to grow it. As for the much larger class who ought to be supplied from our markets, they seldom see or taste a Mushroom except when these occur in profusion in our fields, though every cart of stable-manure produced in this great horse-keeping country may, on its way towards decomposition and replenishing the earth, be made a nidus for furnishing many dishes of them.

The illustrations showing the cave-culture of mushrooms are from my “Parks, Promenades, and Gardens of Paris.” And the frontispiece is after two large cuts of the mushroom caves of Paris, which appeared in the Illustrated London News some time after the appearance of my work. The illustrations of edible fungi are by Mr. Worthington G. Smith, who knows and draws these interesting subjects so thoroughly well; and the other figures are by Mr. Hodgkin.