363 NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



Mr. Lees's paper is of a very different order from tlic last, and 

 proves its author quite incompetent to deal with the subject he has 

 chosen. Discarding the kitchen in favour of Dr. Bull and others, 

 Mr. Lees goes in for pure science ; but our readers may judge of the 

 value of his teachings when we inform them that in his scientific 

 description of the gemis Polyporus he says, " SporiiUa contained in 

 slender asci, and very small " (!) The merest beginner knows that 

 one of the fundamental characters of the genus consists in having 

 spores never contained in asci, and often very large. The author 

 naively informs us that full descriptions of the plants he mentions 

 may be found in Fries's ' Systema Mycologicura ' of 1821, so we can 

 only in charity imagine that Mr. Lees is half a century behind the 

 age, and that the feeling which recently prompted him to adopt the 

 LinneaTi system in his ' Flora of the Malvern Hills' has now led him 

 to ignore the last fifty years of Fries's labours, and to pass over the 

 works of such accurate botanists in this country as Messrs. Berkeley, 

 Broome, Currey, and others. Hence we find Lactarim referred to 

 Agaricus, Trametes to Polyporus, etc., and no author's name appended 

 to any species except Mr. Lees's own. 



The views of the Polyporei are original to a degree. Mr. Lees 

 says, " It has been generally considered that all these arboreal Fungi 

 spring from spores " (!) but that " it seems possible to imagine that 

 (unless the spores are really contained in and circulate with the sap) 

 the alburnum has a metamorphic power of producing simulated 

 forms of Fungi, and that these ' sap-balls ' are not really autonymous 

 plants producing real spores, from which similar pla;its can arise." 

 Also, he is "not aware that experiment has proved the growth of 

 Polypores from actual spores, and in this case the sap of trees when 

 running to waste may have a metamorphic power of retrocession into 

 loioer life." 



Mr. Lees ventures to publish three new species, although he does 

 not know the old ; and after the above quotatid"n our readers will not 

 be surprised to hear that such unascertained and ambiguous things as 

 spores are quite ignored. He says no species with central stems have 

 come under observation in the district, yet the first plant described 

 has normally and generally a central stem. He, however, chooses to 

 remove it to the group with lateral stems, and he writes of the very 

 next species of the group, stem " entirely obsolete." The first new 



