Davidson's book also sent me to my battered copy of David Arora's Mushrooms Demystified -- the one book you must have if you want to hunt mushrooms-- for this anecdote by the Victorian memoirist Gwen Raverat about the smelly, phallic, stinkhorn mushroom. ("Aunt Etty" was Darwin's daughter!)
"In our native woods there grows a kind of a toadstool, called in the vernacular The Stinkhorn, though in Latin it bears a grosser name [Phallus-- SB]. This name is justified, for the fungus can be hunted by scent alone; and this was Aunt Etty's greatest invention: armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing special hunting cloak and gloves, she would sniff her way around the wood, pausing here and there, her nostrils twitching, when she caught a whiff of her prey; then at last, with a deadly pounce, she would fall upon her victim, and then poke his putrid carcass into her basket. At the end of the day's sport, the catch was brought back and burnt in the deepest secrecy on the drawing room fire, with the door locked, because of the morals of the maids".
Don't know if it's as catchy as Derbyshire's (and Nabokov's) favorite H. G. Wells quote "On account of the flies", but I like it...
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