[Vor. 1 
186 ANNALS OF THE MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN 
methods well enough adapted for flowering plants but not for 
fungi. 
Early in the work it became apparent that the diagnoses of 
known species of resupinate Thelephoracee had failed utterly to 
enable the leading working mycologists of any country to recog- 
nize with certainty in the species about them those described in 
other eountries, or those described for their own country by 
earlier students. Тһе truth of this statement is shown by the 
errors and confusion in names of the common species which 
have been distributed in exsiccati, by the fact that in the large 
herbaria several different species are likely to bear the same 
specific name on the same or successive sheets, and by the 
vastly more important fact that the masters of mycology of each 
age, when relying wholly on the diagnoses published by their 
contemporaries or predecessors, have described as new species 
common апа conspicuous resupinate fungi which had been 
accurately described by immediate contemporaries or prede- 
cessors, and in very many cases just as accurately by still earlier 
students. All the mycologists concerned in these redescriptions 
have been earnest strivers after truth, I am convinced, and 
would have preferred to employ the earlier names for their plants, 
could they have known that those earlier names referred with 
certainty to their specimens. All these people were relying, 
as was the usage of their time, on a few words of published 
description in some other than their mother tongue. 
It is time to recognize generally that the resupinate Hymeno- 
mycetes, and especially the Thelephoracee, are extremely diffi- 
cult taxonomic problems. Descriptions must include more 
than a rather vague and generalized characterization of the 
mere superficial appearance and habit of the specimen with 
possibly a reference to spores which some one recorded for what 
was perhaps this species. The fungus itself is an individual of 
the species; the description in words and by illustration has 
merit in proportion to the success it has in producing in the 
mind of any educated stranger exactly the ideas which he could 
derive from the study in detail of the specimen itself. From 
the specimen, exact ideas may be had of coloration, of form, 
of dimensions, of texture, of consistency, of internal structure, 
of organs of minute size, of place of growth, and of host and 
