MycoRant

Cover of an early issue of Popular Science

In cooperation with Google, Popular Science magazine has placed all the content they have ever produced online and free for the browsing. According to the website:

We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. And today we’re excited to announce you can browse the full archive right here on PopSci.com.

This looks to be a great resource for historical as well as practical reasons. One of the comments at the site makes a good point:

03/07/10 at 3:27 pm

I love this! The articles about how to build things like tube radios and chemistry experiments and schematics on how things work. This is the example of how a magazine should be.

No doubt!

Searching for Mycology at Popular Science

I wonder what kinds of interesting information on fungi shows up there? Better check it out. A search for “mushroom” returns 17 results, ranging in date from 1875 to 2000. There are articles about mushrooms books, fungal arts and crafts, mushroom growing–all sorts of things.  Take for example this gem, from the July 1889 issue, Fungi by T. H. McBride, which begins:

The fungi as a class may hardly be called popular. For various reasons they are, so to speak, under a cloud. They are little known, and so in lieu of better information, the legend “poison” seems to run for all the finer and more showy species. If not held absolutely poisonous, most are at least considered useless and are nameless.

It’s a wonderful and fun read.

There is plenty more to peruse. A search for “fungi” also returns 20 results. How about “mycology”? 14. Fungus? 20 again. That’s weird. I’m guessing that the results are limited to 20 per search. Well, the site does say that improvements are in the works. It really isn’t very convenient for scrolling through, but it’s very interesting and entertaining none-the-less.

Tags: history, Popular Science