276 The Irish Naturalist. 



naked-eye work on the flowering-plants, that the classification 

 of fungi presents features of unusual difiiculty. This is not 

 seldom true as regards the determination of the species, owing 

 in many cases to the insufficient descriptions handed on by 

 superficial observers. Up to June, 1892, there were no less 

 than 39,662 sorts of fungi known, and a couple of thousand 

 more at least have been added since. Let us see now what 

 position our fungus is to take amongst so enormous a number 

 of vSpecies. We must first decide what group or family it 

 belongs to. It is clearly a '* Hyphomycete," which means 

 that it belongs to a group composed of minute fungi made up 

 of threads very loosely compacted and bearing *' naked" 

 spores, that is, not enclosed in spore-bags or asci. Such 

 fungi are usually known as " moulds" in English, and certain 

 members of the group make their presence quite obtrusively 

 familiar by covering damp bread, leather, paper, preserves, 

 &c., &c., with blue or green, sometimes with pink or golden 

 patches. Many of these moulds are not "independent" species, 

 that is, they are really only stages in the development of a 

 fungus that forms its spores in asci or bags. Moulds are 

 divided into four groups — Mucedinece, comprising most of the 

 ordinary moulds well known to, and disliked by, the house- 

 keeper ; DematiccB, which have dark brown threads ; Stilbece, 

 in which the lower threads are compacted to form a stalk ; and 

 Tiibcrculariecc, in which the threads are compressed into a 

 wart-like tuft. There is no difficulty in deciding to place our 

 fungus in the third family, Stilbcce, on account of its obvious 

 stalk. Turning to this family we find it divided into two 

 groups, according as the hyphse are pale or dark. Now ,as 

 we have seen that in our specimen the colour is dark brown, 

 save for the terminal branches, we turn to that group, the 

 PhcEOstilbea:. As the individual spores in the specimen are 

 simple and undivided into compartments, we must look in the 

 section Amerosporcs, and here we have to select between a 

 number of competing genera — Sporocybe, Graphium, Harpo- 

 graphiuTJi, Stysanus, and G7nphiotheci2i77i. For reasons, into 

 •which it would occupy too long to enter, we place the specimen 

 in Stysanics, but as it does not agree with any of the three 

 British species given in Mr. Massee's excellent " British 

 Fungus-Flora" (vol. III., p. 458), we look it up in Saccardo's 

 great " Sjdloge," and find that of the seventeen species there 



