Józef Rostafiński

Józef Rostafiński was born in Warsaw on 14 August 1850 and died in Kraków on 5 May 1928. He belongs in a catalogue about fungi for two pieces of work that sit slightly to one side of his career, because he was a botanist and a historian of botany rather than a mycologist. The first is a monograph of the slime moulds written in Polish. The second is a newspaper questionnaire circulated in 1883, two of whose questions — numbers 67 and 68 — asked what country people called mushrooms and what they did with them.

An assistant in Strasbourg

He studied at the Szkoła Główna, Warsaw’s Main School, from 1866 to 1869, then at Jena, Halle and Strasbourg, taking a doctorate in philosophy at Strasbourg in 1873 and habilitating there in 1875. From 1874 to 1876 he was an assistant to Anton de Bary, and the monograph Śluzowce (Mycetozoa) belongs to that Strasbourg period. It was printed in Paris at the expense of the Kórnik Library and written in Polish, which for a technical revision of this standing was not the obvious choice; a German-language precursor, Versuch eines Systems der Mycetozoen, had served as his 1873 dissertation.

Its date is unsettled. The Biodiversity Heritage Library scan, taken from the collected Paris volume, records 1875, while the Polish Wikipedia biography gives 1874. Two cautions belong in the same breath. Rostafiński did not discover the slime moulds and was not the first to describe them: the book is a synthesis and a revision resting on de Bary, Fries and earlier workers, written while its author was de Bary’s assistant. And the Mycetozoa are not placed in the kingdom Fungi by modern classification. They were studied alongside fungi in the 1870s, which is the only reason a slime-mould monograph belongs in a mycological story at all.

An appeal to the non-botanists

In 1883 Rostafiński issued an appeal whose title announced its audience: an address to non-botanists, asking them to collect folk plant names. In its largest version it ran to seventy questions on the use of plants, their cultivation, gathering and naming, and it appeared, as Łuczaj and colleagues record, in around sixty Polish-language newspapers in Prussia, Austro-Hungary and Russia — the three powers that had partitioned the Polish state. It was not a mushroom survey. There were two mushroom questions, and the editors of the mushroom material offer two reasons why so few people answered them: the questions were added only in later versions of the form, and they sat at the very end of a long document, by which point a correspondent might be tired of answering in detail. There is a plain reason why any mushroom questions appeared in a botanical enquiry: fungi were then counted as part of the plant kingdom.

A few hundred replies came back. Surviving catalogues indicate that nearly 370 people took part and sent close to 860 letters, of which only 359, from 227 correspondents, are still extant. Most arrived in 1883, some in 1884, a very few as late as 1909. The letters then had a career of their own. After Rostafiński’s death they passed to Władysław Szafer, and from there, uncatalogued, into the library of the Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Botany, where they were forgotten. Part of the collection resurfaced in the early 1980s and went to the Museum of the University’s Botanic Garden; the remainder followed in the early 2000s.

What thirty letters actually contain

The mushroom replies waited more than 130 years for an editor. Łukasz Łuczaj and Piotr Köhler published their analysis in Etnobiologia Polska in 2014. Of the 227 surviving correspondents, 29 answered the mushroom questions; thirty letters were analysed, covering parts of what is now Poland, Belarus and Ukraine — thirty rather than twenty-nine, because Marina Tomaszewska sent separate lists for two localities. The replies were turned into a database of 468 records, each record a single mushroom name or a single general remark.

Thirty-seven edible taxa, three poisonous and four medicinal were identified to genus, section or species level, beside one medicinal mushroom, recorded as powietrzna bedłka, that could not be placed at all. The number of edible taxa named in one letter ranged from 5 to 27, with a mean of 14 and a median of 13. Sixty-two records, close to 15 per cent of the data, concerned poisonous or inedible fungi, and their names are mostly generic — psie grzyby, dog mushrooms, covers a great deal of ground. The exception is the fly agaric Amanita muscaria, whose many local names are built on much- and musz-, from mucha, a fly, because the mushroom was chiefly used to poison them.

The medicinal records are few and specific: the stinkhorn Phallus impudicus, recorded as morowa bedłka, used during plague and dried as a fumigant against a sore throat; puffballs — probably Lycoperdon, possibly also Bovista or Calvatia — applied to burns; an unidentified tree-dwelling fungus called hubka, used to staunch bleeding; and a morel, Morchella sp., under the name zemłane serce. One correspondent described fermenting fly agaric caps for four weeks and then using them against rheumatism: a record of what was done, not of what worked.

What the letters will not support

This is not an inventory of Polish mushroom gathering. Thirty letters are thirty letters, the identifications rest on ethnolinguistic evidence rather than herbarium specimens, and the editors label every one of them provisional: those without a question mark near-certain, those with one merely very probable. Nor is the survey the first record of Polish folk mycology. Łuczaj and Köhler cite earlier work, among it Bartnicka-Dąbkowska in 1964 and Dekowski in 1968 and 1973, and make a different claim for the questionnaire: that it is one of the most important monuments of European ethnobotany, and the richest nineteenth-century source material on ethnomycology not only in eastern Europe but anywhere.

The practical limit matters more than either. These letters record what people gathered in the nineteenth century, not what is safe. The same lists of edible taxa carry Paxillus involutus and Gyromitra esculenta, whose use has been receding under an information campaign run for several decades in response to poisonings by both. A folk name is a historical document rather than a recommendation, and reading one as advice would be a misuse of the archive.

The Kraków career ran far wider than these two threads. From 1878 Rostafiński held the chair of botany as an extraordinary professor and directed the University’s Botanic Garden until 1901; he became a full professor in 1882, served as dean of the Faculty of Philosophy from 1884 to 1886, and from 1919 until his death taught the history of the biological sciences. His field guide to the wild plants of Poland went through 21 editions between 1886 and 1979, and on 30 April 1925 he received the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. The 1883 letters are still held in the Museum of the Jagiellonian University Botanic Garden, and the appendix to Łuczaj and Köhler’s paper prints the names exactly as their writers spelled them — the quickest way to find out whether a mushroom name still used in one district is more than a hundred and forty years old.