208 NEW PUBLICATIONS. 
This work is published under the auspices of the Academy of Medi- 
cine of Turin; it is folio in size, and the learned author prints five 
and a half lines of titles after his name on the title-page (each line 
eight inches long) ; but we imagine that neither the prestige of the 
Academy nor the voluminous titles of the author will save the book 
from well-merited condemnation. Indeed, we see little use in criticiz- 
ing it s all, for when the author refers to a certain species as ** dan- 
gerous," and we turn to the plate only to see a totally different spe- 
cies represented, belonging to a wholly different section of the 4ga- 
ricini, it will be seen that the book places itself beyond the bounds of 
criticism. To take an example at random: plate 44 is said to rep 
sent Agaricus aureus. This eo comes under Pholiota, amd the 
characters of Pholiota are brown spores, and a ring or annulus to the 
stem ; in the figure, * carefully coloured after nature," the gills are 
pure white, and, of the twenty stems shown on the plate, not one has 
a trace of an annulus. To make the confusion worse, Dr. Valenti-Serini 
says it is the same with Sowerby's A. fascicularis (t. 285), which is 
a Hypholoma, with purple spores, and gills at first dirty yellow, then 
purplish-green; but the doctor's figure is probably neither one nor 
the other. To show how totally unfit the book is for modern students, 
we may add that the author does not refer to books published within 
the last thirty years. He is unacquainted with the * Epierisis " of 
Fries; and (although the book, with the exception of two species, treats 
wholly of the Hymenomycetes) he does not know Fries’ * Monographia 
Hymenomycetum ;’ and there are no references made to well-known 
modern books by Berkeley and others. The letter-press is wordy and 
meagre, and, as it generally refers to some other species than the one 
intended to be described, it is of little value. The cases of poisoning 
and records of experiments with Fungi would have been more valuable 
had names, places, and dates been given. The book has already found 
its way into the libraries of this country ; and for such students as 
care to know what species the cartoons most resemble (if they resemble 
any), the following table may be useful. In the cases where the 
plates are not referred to, it remains an open question whether the 
species are correctly named by the author or not ; in the cases where 
the names given are correct, they are in synonyms now quite out of 
date. This may be seen at once in plates 2 and 3, where varieties of 
Agaricus phalloides, Fr., are termed Agaricus bulbosus citrinus and 
"vt PIRE CR UR, 1L, GRECO NN E ESSEN AN 
