MYCOLOGY 



By ERNST ATHEARN BESSEY 



Michigan State College, East Lansing 



The word "mycology," applied to the study of fungi, is not very many years 

 older than the beginning of the hundred-year period covered by this series of 

 papers. In the Latin form, mijcologia, it was used by Persoon (1801). As an 

 English word, according to Murray (1908), it was first used by the Reverend 

 Miles Joseph Berkeley in 1846 in British Flora, Fungi, in which, also, he applied 

 the term "mycologist" to the students of fungi. In 1850 Fresenius used the 

 word in the German form. After that it came into general usage in European 

 publications in France and Italy, as well as in England and Germany, though in 

 England the word "fungology" was frequently used, a term introduced by 

 Berkeley in 1860. 



Fungi were known to the ancients. Indeed the Emperor Nero was very fond 

 of eating the mushroom Amanita caesarea Schaff. ex. Fr., the specific epithet 

 being given because of this fact. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 

 the larger fungi attracted the attention of botanists more and more but it was 

 not until the publication of the works of Christiaan Ilendrik Persoon (1801, 

 1822-1828) and Elias Magnus Fries (1821-1832 and many subsequent publica- 

 tions until about the time of his death in 1878) that the larger fungi were 

 studied extensively as well as intensively. The microscopic fungi were mostly 

 given scant attention or entirely passed over until the improvements of the 

 compound microscope made it possible to study their structure and to begin to 

 form systems of classification for them. The path-breaking work of Corda (1837- 

 1854) was scarcely completed by the middle of the last century. By the use of 

 the microscope and the numerous illustrations in his great work, he added thous- 

 ands of microscopic or semimicroscopic species to our knowledge. 



It must be remembered that one hundred years ago many botanists and other 

 students of natural history believed that the small fungi occurring on or within 

 the tissues of plants and animals were not distinct beings but actually modifica- 

 tions of the diseased tissues of the host organisms, or "exanthemata." This was 

 the view held by Elias Magnus Fries (1821-1832, 1836-1838), and Friedrich 

 Wilhelm Wallroth (1833). In this same year Franz Josef Andreas Nicolaus 

 linger, in one of the earlier books on pliytopathology, Die Exantheme der Pflan- 

 zen (1833), supported these ideas. Twenty years later the English botanist, 

 John Lindley, in his book The Vegetable Kingdom, altliough apparently ques- 

 tioning the development of fungi by other means than from spores, asserts that 

 many botanists still hold to the vieAvs of Fries and Unger. Yet he doubts the 

 ability of fungi to cause plant disease, indicating that they enter tissues already 

 diseased from other causes, such as extreme moisture, drought, malnutrition, and 

 so forth. This whole question is very dramatically set forth by Large in his very 



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