Vintage Botanical Print - Protostropharia semiglobata - (Syn: Agaricus semiglobatus)

A quality reproduction vintage print of Protostropharia semiglobata (Syn: Agaricus semiglobatus), an illustration from John Stephenson and James Morss Churchill's Medical Botany, Vol 3 (1836), or - to give it its full title: Medical Botany; Or. Illustrations And Descriptions Of The Medicinal Plants Of The London, Edinburgh, And Dublin Pharmacopoeias; Comprising A Popular And Scientific Account Of Poisonous Vegetables Indigenous To Great Britain.

John Stephenson, 1790 -1864, was a Medical Doctor and Fellow of the Linnean Society. James Morss Churchill, 1796 -1863, was a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, a Fellow of the Medico Botanical Society of London and also a Fellow of the Linnean Society.

In their entry on Agaricus semiglobatus, Stephenson and Churchill write, "The genus, Agaricus, is believed to contain upwards of a thousand different species. Sprengel enumerates only six hundred and forty-six; but this is much below the real number, as referred to by other authors. The A. semiglobatus is one of the most common, and, if Messrs. Brande and Sowerby's account be correct, the most deleterious of the tribe. It occurs in most parts of the kingdom, in exposed and elevated pastures, moist meadows and woods, from May to September. Dr. Greville says, it is extremely common in Scotland; and Mr. Curtis found it in great abundance about Peckham, Hornsey, and other places near London.

It generally grows singly, but sometimes springs up in clusters, especially on dunghills, or on those spots where dung has been thrown. The stipes, or stem, is from three to six inches in height, and two or three lines in diameter, pale yellowish, hollow, the tube being very small, and sometimes partly filled with a white pith; more or less crooked, somewhat incrassated towards the base, glutinous, furnished with a ring, and mostly dotted with black immediately beneath the pileus. The pileus is from half an inch to an inch and a half in breadth, of a pale reddish- orange, or straw-colour, in the full grown ones exactly hemis- pherical, rarely becoming in large specimens plano-convex, very glutinous, and smooth, hence the name glutinosus given to it by Curtis. The usual colour of the cap is reddish-orange, but when wet with rain it becomes browner and transparent, so that it sometimes appears as if striated. The flesh is thin and white. The lamellæ are numerous, fixed, horizontal, extending in a right line, or nearly so, from the margin of the pileus to the stipes, and beautifully mottled with the purplish black sporidia. With regard to this species, it may not be improper to remark, that the poisonous qualities usually ascribed to it, are still some- what problematical. Mr. Sowerby states, that it was the variety marked No. 1 on our Plate, which nearly proved fatal to a poor family in London, who were so indiscreet as to stew a quantity of it, gathered in Hyde Park, for breakfast. We cannot help thinking, however, with Dr. Greville, that the plant, with the acuminated pileus, is a distinct species from the other figures on the same plate."

Indeed, the mushroom marked No. 1 on the Plate does look like a completely different species...

First described by August Johann Georg Karl Batsch in 1786 as Agaricus semiglobatus it was revised as Stropharia semiglobata in 1872 by French mycologist Lucien Quélet before the genus Protostrpharia was proposed by American mycologist Scott Redhead in 2013 for which Protostropharia semiglobata became the type species.