Joan Paucke, age 13, of Villiamsport, na. for her question:

How can you tell mushrooms from toadstools?

The botanist does not divide the fungus plant family into mushrooms and toadstools: However, in everyday speech, these terms make a lot of sense. The mushrooms are fungi that taste good and will not harm us. The toadstools are the poisonous ones ‑ and sometimes deadly. Also, there is a large group of non‑poisonous fungi which is tough, woody and flavorless

Every year a certain number of people eat toadstools which they mistook for mushrooms. So here is a word of warning from iindy to his friends. It is never smart to eat fungi you have gathered in the wild ‑even when you know all the rules for recognizing mushrooms. Certain toadstools look just like young button mushrooms. Certain fungi are edible only at a certain stage of the life cycle.

If you wish to gather wild mushrooms, take along an expert. He will never gather young fungus plants. At the button stage it is almost impossible to tell what kind of a fungus a plant will grow up to be. He will chose fully grown, open umbrellas.

The expert is also sure to gather the entire stem of the umbrellas, oven digging down in the soil. Some of the most deadly toadstools have a little cup around the base of the stem underground. On the surface these poisoners might fool you.

The last rule applies to the fungus spores. These are the tiny seedlets, clinging like dust to the underside of the umbrellas. Mushroom spores are dark. Toadstool spores are pale or white. The expert will spend some time testing the spore color of any fungi he plans to eat.

In mature fungi, the spore dust is loose and easy to see. In younger specimen, it may be tightly packed in the gills under the umbrella. In this case, your expert will break a cap and place it gill side down on a piece of dark paper. He will place a tumbler upside down to form a little glass house over the fungus cap on its dark paprr. This test is left undisturbed for 24 hours. By then, row of little spores will have fallen onto the paper.

If the spores are white, the fungus is a toadstool. Another test is with the juices or liquids in the fungus. If the juice is light or milky, chances are the fungus is a toadstool.

So you see it is no easy job, even for an expert to tell the mushrooms from the toadstools. And he will tell you that the easiest and safest way to get mushrooms is to buy them in a food store. These fungi have been especially grown for the table and, in any case, are likely to taste better than most wild varieties you can find.

Truffles and morels, however, are said to taste better than our reliable old mushroom and these fungi delicacies refuse to be cultivated. But it is never safe to sample them unless an expert has guaranteed them to be edible.

Always remember that gathering mushrooms in the wild is most certainly not a do‑it‑yourself project.