BESSEY: MYCOLOGY 231 



thecium, so that Brefeld erroneously thought that there was only a single ascus 

 with many spores. Similarly, he postulated an intermediate group, Hemiba- 

 sidii, for the Ustilaginaceae in which the promycelium is several-celled and pro- 

 duces a variable number of sporidia. This was considered to be an early step 

 toward the promycelium of Tilletia, in which there is only one cell and a smaller 

 (but rather variable) number of sporidia is borne at its apex. From that to the 

 Eubasidii, with normally four basidiospores at the top of the one-celled basi- 

 dium, was the next step. When De Bary criticized these ideas of Brefeld, the 

 latter became bitter and finally began to claim for himself the pure-culture 

 method of the study of fungi (although in his first publications he credited his 

 revered teacher with its invention). 



It is interesting that, although Brefeld's contention that sexual reproduc- 

 tion was entirely lacking in the higher fungi was long ago disproved for Asco- 

 mycetes and Basidiomycetes (Harper, 1896; Dangeard, 1907), his system of 

 classification, modified to be sure, has long held sway in Germany and elsewhere 

 and was retained in the revised edition of Engler and Prantl in 1928. 



The lichens were not studied as intensively by De Bary as the other fungi. 

 Yet because of the similarity of their "gonidia" to free-living algae he suggested 

 (1866) two possibilities as to their function in the lichen: either the mature 

 lichens were the completely developed fruiting conditions of organisms ("goni- 

 dia") whose incompletely developed forms were placed among the algae as Nos- 

 tocaceae, etc., or they are typical algae which had become parasitized by certain 

 fungi of the Ascomycetes. The latter suggestion may well have been what led 

 Simon Schwendener to his interpretation of the role of the fungi and algae in 

 the lichens, which he demonstrated in 1867 and 1868. 



Friedrich Wilhelm Zopf (b. 1846, d. 1909) was for many years Professor of 

 Botany at the University of Halle a. S. He made extensive studies on the Chy- 

 tridiales and other small aquatic fungi parasitic in algae and small animals. 

 His textbook on fungi (1890) was, next to that of De Bary, the outstanding 

 work on the subject for many decades. 



I must not fail to call attention to the very extensive mycological work done 

 by the Englishman, Dr. A. H. Reginald Buller, who was for the greater part of 

 his mycological career Professor of Botany at the University of Manitoba. His 

 student work was carried on in England, where he received the B.Sc. and D.Sc. 

 degrees, and at Leipzig, where he obtained the Ph.D. degree. Thus he combined 

 in his training the best of the British and German traditions. His major studies 

 were reported in a series of seven volumes entitled Researches on Fungi (1909- 

 1950). These contain detailed reports of his very ingenious experiments and 

 careful observations on the activities and structures of fungi, mainly on Ure- 

 dinales, Polyporales, and Agaricales, but including also Piloholus among the 

 Mucorales, spore dispersal in the Ascomycetes and other fungi, etc. Besides 

 these seven volumes he published numerous shorter notes of great interest, many 

 of them in the British journal. Nature. Many of Buller's students have become 

 prominent mycologists in Canada and the United States. 



In the foregoing pages I have omitted mention of the studies upon the fungi 

 that attack man and other animals. Some of the forms that attack insects and 

 form external fruiting bodies, e.g., Cordyceps, Isaria, etc., were described over 

 two hundred years ago. At first there was a tendency to consider that the ap- 



