[buller] presidential ADDRESS 3 



fungi and truffles, especially those which are used for eating, grow most 

 commonly in thundery and wet weather, as the poet of Aquinum says: 

 Et facient lautas optata tonitrua coenas."^ Matthiolus, in the Prague 

 edition of his Herbal, dated 1563, expressed the same views in almost 

 identically the same words.^ 



The doctrine of spontaneous generation for fungi was accepted by 

 Cesalpino, the chief exponent of Aristotelian botany in the sixteenth 

 century, he who discussed the seat of the soul in plants and argued that 

 it exists in the pith where the stem and root are united. • In his great 

 work, De Plantis Libri XVI, published in 1583, he says concerning 

 Fungi and certain other organisms: "Some plants have no seed; 

 these are the most imperfect, and spring from decaying substances; 

 they therefore only have to feed themselves and grow, and are unable 

 to produce their like; they are a sort of intermediate existences be- 

 tween plants and inanimate nature. In this respect Fungi resemble 

 Zoophytes which are intermediate between plants and animals, and 

 of the same nature are the Lemnae, Lichens, and many plants which 

 grow in the sea."^ 



Toward the end of the Sixteenth Century, a reaction against the 

 views of the ancients concerning the origin of fungi set in. A Neapoli- 

 tan by the name of Porta, in the year 1591, published a book called 

 Phytognomonica in which he had a chapter headed: Contrary to the 

 Ancients All Plants are Provided with Seed. In this chapter, he refers 

 to fungi and says: "From fungi I have succeeded in collecting seed, 

 very small and black, lying hidden in oblong chambers or furrows 

 extending from the stalk to the circumference, and chiefly from those 

 which grow on stones, where, when falling, the seed is sown and sprouts 

 with perennial fertility. Falsely therefore has Porphyrius said that 

 fungi, since they do not arise from seed, are the children of the gods. 

 So also in Truffles, a black seed lies hidden. On this account, they 

 come forth in woods where they have frequently been produced and 

 have rotted away. And I have often seen them arising where the 

 washings of tan or the tan itself is thrown away."^ Porta had un- 

 doubtedly guessed aright. It is evident that he did actually set his 

 eyes upon the reproductive bodies of fungi. The black dust, which he 

 mentions as lying hidden in oblong chambers or furrows extending from 

 the stalk to the circumference, was probably the dark spores which 



^ The poet of Aquinum was Juvenal. The line cited is from Juvenal's Sat. 

 V, in which a feast is described: "After this Truffles will be handed round, if it is 

 Spring, and if the longed-for thunders have produced the precious dainties." 



2 Matthiolus, Neu Kreuterbuch, Prag, 1563, p. 476. 



^ Andrea Cesalpino, De Plantis Libri XVI, Florence, 1583, lib. I, cap. XIV, 

 p. 28. 



*J. B. Porta, Phytognomonica, 1591, Francofurti, lib. VI, cap. II, p. 369. 



