22 IHK lIV.MKMXJASTKAtK.K (>1- TASMANIA, 



Cooke points out in his introduction to the Handbook 

 that Australia is peculiarly rich in the Sub-class Gastro- 

 mycet'js. He says, after quoting figures: — "From this we 

 conclude that Gastromycetes ai-e unusually strong in Aus- 

 tralia, certainly including some interesting genera not 

 hitherto discovered elsewhere, but weak in subterrauean 

 species.' 



Discoveries since the publication of Cooke's work still 

 bear out the general statement, but quite upset his con- 

 clusion that there is a paucity of underground Gastro- 

 niycetes ; so far from this being the case, Tasmania at^ 

 least is so rich in these forms that if no more species are 

 in future added from the mainland, it would still place 

 the underground species for the Australian region as very 

 high. Lea.ving the partially submerged groups, as Sclero- 

 derma and Sccotium, on one side, ana referring tc what is 

 generaliv kntiwn as underground forms, which is the sense 

 intended by Cooke, we have in Tasmania twenty-one species, 

 of which nineteen belong to the family of Hymenogas- 

 traccse. This is in a described fungus-ilora of under seven 

 hundred species. In England, at the time of the publica- 

 tion of Massees "Fungus Flora" (1892), there were 4.895 

 species, and the Hymenogastraceae contained only twenty- 

 three species. 



Judging from these figures, we may' conclude that in 

 Tasmania at least, however backward may be the know- 

 ledge of other groups, we have described nearly, if not all, 

 of our members of the Hymenogaster family ; were it other- 

 wise, we must possess a most astonishing number. The 

 object of the present paper is to bring together our know- 

 ledge of this interesting family, information that is not at 

 present at the service of local students. At the end of 

 the paper a record will be included of the genus Secotium, 

 because otherwise some of that group might be easily taken 

 to be Hymenogasters. also because it is directly continuous 

 with it. 



For the information of those not acquainted with the 

 systematic position of the family, isome general statements 

 mav be pemiitted. There arc many classes of fungi, but 

 of these two stand out from tho rest by containing all the 

 species that attain a conspicuous size. These two classes 

 are the Ascomycetes and the Basidiomycetes. In the first 

 class the spores are borne in closed sacks or a.sci ; in the 

 second, the spores are borne upon basidia. A basidium 

 is an enlarged cell upon which four, rarely fewer, or more, 

 spicules are formed, upon the apex of each of which a spore 



