PREFACE 



The present work is the outgrowth of studies begun under 

 Professors T. H. Macbride and B. Shimek, while a graduate 

 student in the State University of Iowa, where three years were 

 spent as a research Scholar and later Fellow in botany, and has 

 been continued as a special problem, intermittently, up to the 

 present time. 



Official connection with The New York Botanical Garden, 

 since the autumn of 1908, has afforded unusual opportunity to 

 collect in the eastern states and the islands of the American 

 tropics. Two expeditions have been made to the Bermuda 

 Islands; the first in company with Dr. N. L. Britton and the 

 late Stewardson Brown of Philadelphia, and the second with 

 Professor H. H. \\'hetzel of Cornell University; one to the Island 

 of Trinidad, just off the South American Coast, again in company 

 with Dr. Britton; and one to Porto Rico and the American 

 Virgin Islands, St. Thomas and St. Croix, as guest of the Porto 

 Rican government. All of these trips have furnished valuable 

 data for the work which is now being presented. 



No private herbarium has been maintained but all of the 

 collections made by the author have been merged with those of 

 The New York Botanical Garden, which collection is very rich 

 in American and European material. In the course of the work, 

 collecting has been carried on from North Dakota to Colorado 

 and New Mexico and east to New York and New England. No 

 time has been spent in the far west. These collections have 

 been supplemented by material sent, not onh' from every part 

 of North America, but from nearly every part of the world. 



Early in his work on Discomycetes the author came into 

 contact, b\' correspondence, with Dr. E. J. Durand, then of 

 Cornell University, and at that time an enthusiastic and, by 

 all means, the foremost student of Discomycetes in America. 

 Unfortunately his work was cut short b\' death before he had 

 published any considerable part of his results on the operculate 

 cup-fungi. It was the author's privilege to correspond and to 

 exchange specimens with him up to the time of his death. His 



1 



