20 JOURNAL OF THE 



the Dematium aluta, taken out of the ships of war built by our 

 government, on Lake Erie, where, in a few years, he remarks, "this 

 little fungulous enemy completely destroyed that fleet which had so 

 signally vanquished the armament of Britain." (Syn. Fungor, in 

 Am. Bor., p. 287.) 



In the synopsis of the " Fungi of Lusatia," the authors, with be- 

 coming spirit, discarded the then too frequent practice of writers in 

 changing the names of plants and adopting new synonyms, merely, 

 as would often appear, to compel future naturalists to cite their own 

 names in connection with the trivial specific appellations which they 

 choose to affix to well-known objects. This course they avoided 

 under the conviction that natural history had received, and was 

 daily receiving, great detriment from the accumulation and confu 

 sion of these synonyms. 



They, moreover, assiduously avoided superfluous repetition of the 

 names of classes, orders, genera, and species, and gave a true syn- 

 opsis of the department which they professed to treat. They 

 followed the steps of Persoon, sensible that though this method may 

 be in some points defective, it is better not to depart from so able a 

 guide, for, they remark, "it is well known how much easier it is to 

 find fault with our neighbor's house than to build a better and more 

 commodious one ourselves." "A solid basis to this department of 

 botanical science," they add, must be laid not on a sandy founda- 

 tion, on the yaryiog freaks and fancies of the mind, but on a per- 

 petual daily and nightly employment of microscopic observation, a 

 diligent and oft repeated examination of the whole history of the 

 fungus tribes, a careful perusal of authors, a comparison of their 

 respective synonyms, and above all by the observation of living na- 

 ture herself, as she unfolds her rich abundance in the recesses of 

 forests, lawns and marshes; an observation which must be continued 

 from day to day and from year to year if we would reap the true 

 reward of our labor." 



At the period when von Schweinitz and Albertini wrote there had 

 been recently broached, in some of the German Journals, particu- 

 larly Voight's Magazine, certain monstrous hypotheses, concerning 

 the very nature of the fungi, and " which one could scarcely credit 

 his senses in perusing;" — hypotheses which ascribed the existence of 

 several species of these plants to mutations of form, alleging that 

 the Tuhulina fragiforma was nothing more than the progeny of the 

 Phallus impudicus, which, growing old, at length became metamor- 

 phosed into a Lichen ; thus, in the mere wantonness of authority, 

 confounding with one scroll of the pen two great classes of the veg- 



