REPORT OF THE STATE BOTANIST, I919 45 



the general collection, and these I found to agree with the concep- 

 tions of the species as given in the monograph. 



The rest of the collections, although the packets were, with few 

 exceptions, marked with the name of a species of Inocybe, were 

 found to be in considerable confusion. It should be remembered at 

 this point, that this is inevitably to be expected under the circum- 

 stances, and does not, in my opinion, reflect in the slightest on the 

 perspicacity of Doctor Peck. He had many duties as State Botanist ; 

 in the earlier years of his collecting, accurate microscopical informa- 

 tion on European species was practically lacking ; later, the accumu- 

 lations of any season, his own and those from many parts of the 

 country, naturally made it impossible to go back over all former 

 collections and keep them revised to date. It would have been pos- 

 sible in dealing with the genus Inocybe alone, but impossible in the 

 whole field of fungi, to say nothing of the plant kingdom as a \vhole. 

 It is not surprising, then, to find that, for example, many packets 

 marked Inocybe suhochracea Pk., did not contain that species at all, 

 but on examination were found to be scattered over half a dozen 

 other species. A glance in the microscope was sufficient to show 

 that no cystidia were present in some instances, or that the spores 

 were angular in others. This shows, I think, that Doctor Peck did 

 either not at first realize the importance of cystidia as he did later, 

 or that he found it impracticable to examine microscopically the 

 mass of collected material, and wishing to preserve it, depended on 

 his undoubted wonderful memory to decide the species from external 

 characters alone. 



The dried herbarium specimens of the species of this genus are 

 far more easily and satisfactorily diagnosed than is usually the case 

 in dried Agarics. This is due to a number of sharply defined micro- 

 scopic morphological characters which persist in the dried plants. 

 Since these characters are fundamental with regard to the relation- 

 ships of the species in the genus, their study should give us a better 

 clue to such relationships and mark a step toward a phylogenetic 

 system of the Agarics. It seems worth while, then, to present below 

 a scheme based on the microscopical features of the species. This 

 has been arrived at, not only by the study of the Albany collections, 

 but of those in the New York Botanical Garden, my own collections, 

 the published descriptions of Professor Atkinson, those from the 

 collections at several universities, and especially the extensive col- 

 lections of Simon Davis of Brookline, Mass. Only the plants in the 



