Vegetarianism in the Forest by G.K. Chesterton

HUMPHREY PUMP'S cooking of a fungus in an old frying-pan (which he had / found on the beach) was extremely typical of him. He was, indeed, / without any pretence of book-learning, a certain kind of scientific man / that science has really been unfortunate in losing. He was the / old-fashioned English Naturalist like Gilbert White or even Isaac / Walton, who learned things not academically like an American Professor, / but actually, like an American Indian. And every truth a man has found / out as a man of science is always subtly different from any truth he has / found out as a man, because a man's family, friends, habits and social / type have always got well under way before he has thoroughly learned the / theory of anything. For instance, any eminent botanist at a _Soirée_ of / the Royal Society could tell you, of course, that other edible fungi / exist, as well as mushrooms and truffles. But long before he was a / botanist, still less an eminent botanist, he had begun, so to speak, on / a basis of mushrooms and truffles. He felt, in a vague way, that these / were really edible, that mushrooms were a moderate luxury, proper to the / middle classes, while truffles were a much more expensive luxury, more / suitable to the Smart Set. But the old English Naturalists, of whom / Isaac Walton was perhaps the first, and Humphrey Pump perhaps the last, / had in many cases really begun at the other end, and found by experience / (often most disastrous experience) that some fungi are wholesome and / some are not; but the wholesome ones are, on a whole, the majority. So a / man like Pump was no more afraid of a fungus as such than he was of an / animal as such.

He no more started with the supposition that a grey or / purple growth on a stone must be a poisonous growth than he started with / the supposition that the dog who came to him out of the wood must be a / mad dog. Most of them he knew; those he did not know he treated with / rational caution, but to him, as a whole race, these weird-hued and / one-legged goblins of the forests were creatures friendly to man.