David Paul Mi11er, age 10, of St. Albans, W. Va., for his question:

How do mushrooms differ from toadstools?

An expert may tell you that all these pale members Of the fungus plant family are mushrooms. But we non experts know for surf that some of them are toadstools and that toadstools are poisonous, if eaten. Well, the expert will not argue with us about this. He will inform us that toadstool is a word of the non expert. It is a mushroom which is poisonous or uneatable for some other reason.

Many mushrooms are poisonous toadstools, and no non expert is qualified to tell which is which. What's more, some mushrooms are safe at certain stages and deadly poisonous at others. Even an expert hesitates to taste some of these tricky fungi. A non expert of good sense would never risk eating a mushroom that he found growing in the wilds, no matter how innocent or how delicious it looks