8 Curtis : Lucien Marcus Underwood 



The results of the labor of these years appears in several papers 

 upon the Hepaticae, ferns, and fern allies, while his growing inter- 

 est in the fungi is indicated by the appearance in 1889 (under joint 

 authorship with O. F. Cook) of " A Century of Illustrative Fungi " 

 and his " Generic Synopses of the Basidiomycetes and Myxo- 

 mycetes." Both of these works were designed to enable the 

 beginner to become somewhat familiar with the fungi, the first 

 work being a collection of one hundred of our more common 

 species put up in book form. 



Securing a year's leave of absence in 1890, he accepted a 

 Morgan fellowship at Harvard University for the purpose of study- 

 ing the Sullivant and Taylor collections of hepatics and he also 

 had in mind a revision of the Polyporaceae, in which group he 

 had been working for several years. This work was interrupted 

 early in 1891 by his undertaking for the Department of Agricul- 

 ture a study of the extent and distribution of the orange disease 

 in Florida. This investigation enabled him to make large collec- 

 tions in many sections of Florida and he also made an excursion 

 into Cuba, in the hope of securing extensive collections of ferns. 

 Returning north in April, he collected at several stations in Georgia 



Herbar 



Wh 



De Pauw University, Greencastle, Indiana. This was the first time 

 in his career that he had the opportunity to direct his attention to 

 botany alone, and it is noteworthy that he accepted this position 

 at a lower salary than he was receiving and also at the same time 

 declined a more remunerative position in another institution in 

 order to specialize more closely. There now followed a period of 

 work under the most congenial surroundings and during these 

 four years he published numerous papers on the lower groups of 

 plants. He was a member of the original committee on nomen- 

 clature at the Rochester meeting of the American Association in 

 1892 and was selected as the delegate to carry the report of the 

 American botanists on this question to the International Botanical 

 Congress in Genoa. He was one of the vice-presidents of the 

 Genoa Congress and took part in the discussion which resulted in 

 fixing 1753 as the date of commencing botanical nomenclature. 

 He was greatly influenced by this visit to the Continent, and took 



