122 Rhodora [June 
it presents an abundance (505) of photographs, nearly all life size, 
which present, at first sight, a good appearance. When this has been 
said there is little more to say in commendation; yet it may be added 
that the publishers have done their part well, for the paper, and press- 
work leave little to be desired. ‘The book appears fairly compendious. 
The inquisitive mushroom hunter, impatient to tag his finds, has here 
a larger number of names to choose from than in other popular works 
(barring Mellvaine's, perhaps), and will probably succeed to his 
satisfaction in selecting a label two times out of three for the particular 
toadstool in hand. He will not be heard to say quite so often: “I 
can't find it in the book." Whether his toadstool and his label will 
really belong together is quite another matter, which cannot greatly 
concern him, for in this pursuit ignorance (except of fatally poisonous 
sorts) is truly bliss, and greater knowledge — to be avoided by com- 
placent self-respect — brings only greater discontent. 
Perhaps it would be wrong to say that complacency is a characteristic 
of the book, for the impression conveyed at the opening by the full- 
page portrait of the author (somewhat reduced from life — the work 
is only a small quarto) is tempered by a deprecatory introduction by 
the late W. A. Kellerman, and by a modest preface. From the in- 
troduction we learn, with a sense of the fitness of the verb, that the 
author “has meddled for years with the various kinds" of mushrooms 
"which are edible and otherwise," and that the resultant inevitable 
desire to publish is only of recent growth, fostered, we infer, by too 
kind and too laudatory friends; in the preface and in the first chapter, 
on "Why Study Mushrooms," we are told from what simple, natural 
beginnings the impulse grew. Early botanical studies under Dr. 
Nelson, a deep-seated love of nature, the sight of the children of recent 
Bohemian immigrants to Ohio gathering mushrooms with blind, 
unerring instinct in a new land, awakened in the author a desire which 
developed a hobby, and finally the unrestrainable ambition to smooth 
and illuminate the path of his stumbling, groping countrymen. In 
this he says he follows the example of certain “ministers of the gospel 
‚+. -famous in the mycological world,....Rev. Lewis Schweinitz of 
Bethlehem, Pa.; Rev. M. J. Berkeley and Rev. John Stevenson of 
England. Their influence for good and helpfulness to their fellowmen 
will be lasting." ‘The heart, we see, as well as the head, is enlisted in 
the work; shall we say also the yearning to be ranked among the 
world's benefactors and to fill a niche in the Hall of Fame? 
