vi Preface. 



With this object, the materials from which the following 

 pages are compiled have been collected from the various 

 handbooks, transactions, pamphlets, and periodicals in 

 which the several authors have published their work. 

 This has been a task of some little difficulty, and has 

 taken several years to accomplish. It has been my en- 

 deavour in all cases to acknowledge the individual work 

 of each author, but has not always been possible for me to 

 do so. 



The descriptions of the species are in the main those 

 of the late Dr. Winter in the new edition of Rabenhorst's 

 " Kryptogamen-Flora," although I have not scrupled to 

 amend them in various way.s, partly from my own observa- 

 tions, and partly from the writings of others. The arrange- 

 ment of the species is that first proposed by Dr. J. Schroter 

 and employed by Winter in the above-named work, to 

 which I must refer the student for the descriptions of those 

 European species which are not known to be British, as 

 well as for the full details of the synonymy of those 

 described in the present work. As the present generation 

 of British students owe their knowledge almost exclusively 

 to the writings of Dr. M. C. Cooke, the synonymy of his 

 two works, "The Handbook of British Fungi," and "Micro- 

 scopic Fungi," is given in full. The synonymy of the 

 older British botanists has, however, not been omitted. 



The biology of the Uredineae is, in the main, the work 

 of the late Professor De Bary, and of the Ustilaginese that 

 of Von Waldheim, Brefeld, and Schroter. During the past 

 seven years I have devoted much time to these two groups 

 of fungi, and have made between nine hundred and a 

 thousand experimental cultures, with the object of working 

 out the life-history of those species of which it was unknown, 



