THE NEW LINNAEUS

"They're highly poisonous," said the stranger, slowing down to speak. "Instant liver failure."

He walked on, looking back critically a couple of times as if suspecting I would suddenly reach down, tear the toadstools from their log and cram them hungrily into my mouth.

It would have been an inelegant place to die - bent upside down in a leaf silted stream with my phone camera tilted so their underneaths could be seen through the viewer.

These are what he was talking about.

.

This is how he saw them.

This is what I was seeing.

The same fungus; a different angle.

Apparently a completely different being.

Totally different atmosphere.

I don't know how anyone can tell what's what!

And on the same stump - these.

I'm calling them Pasta Shell Fungus.

And these

(There were others too but they were darkly purple and round a corner. I'd have needed a tripod . . . a spotlight . . . anyway, they wouldn't photograph.)

.

* * * * *

Further along the stream, where the ditch water was running properly but smellyly; where it was horrible and muddy and little bitey things were hovering round my ankles . . . there were these, also on a log.

In the photo, they look dry and pleasant. They were dry - but definitely not pleasant. They looked like a pale version of the large, fat, orange slugs everyone says don't do much damage in a garden but which make me shudder if ever I turn over a stone and find one there.

In fact, they were so repelling, I had to force myself to stay. I don't even like the pictures, though I realise they probably don't look too bad unless you've met this slug in person.

Sometimes, it's square . . . then it turns into a dome, then it stretches out . . . oh! I'll give myself nightmares.

And while I was ploughing about in the mud, wishing I didn't have to wait until Christmas for another pair of shoes (I have only one pair till then; one for outside and clogs for the house) I was thinking how much I am treading in Darwin's footsteps. I am the new Linnaeus. For, after all, they, like me, were starting from a point of relative ignorance. It was only because they got there first that they were allowed to do all the identifying and describing . . . and naming. But how they felt about their discoveries wouldn't have been a lot different.

"Oh look!" Darwin would have said. "Doesn't that fungus look just like a three inch wide pasta shell!"

"Indeed it does!" Linnaeus would have replied. "Let's call it a "Fungus Pasta Shellicus!". And Darwin would have said "But doesn't that sound too much like a name for a dinosaur?" And Philip Gosse . . . (along to keep an eye on things) would have said "And what's a dinosaur when it's at home?"

Sort of thing.

Don't you think?

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