bad ones) writes on the subject of new species : "If Nature had spent 

 her millions of years in experimenting, she probably could not have 

 produced as many different species of fungi as have been scribbled 

 together by mankind in one century. In the fourteen volumes of 

 Saccardo's Sylloge Fungorum, 47,304 species are described. Thanks 

 to the species manufacturing mania of his predecessors the true in- 

 vestigator is compelled to waste the greater part of his energy and 

 time with the compilation of names of the same meaning, synonyms 

 and superfluous, empty names." Since Dr. Hollos wrote the above, 

 only four years ago, four volumes of Saccardo have appeared and 

 10,711 "new species" added, making the total 58,015, or probably 

 60,000 at the present writing. Who knows them all? Or who knows 

 even a tenth part of them? Or who could ever be able to learn one- 

 tenth part of them in a life-time? The subject of mycology is too 

 large for any one man to master now in detail. From the very nature 

 it must work into the hands of special students of special families, 

 and I believe only by this means can anything permanent be accom- 

 plished. I do not condemn new species simply because they are 

 claimed to be new. I have seen in the Gastromycetes a great many 

 that I have condemned because I did not find them new, but I have 

 found many that appear to me to be well founded. Notwithstanding 

 the "sixty thousand" there are a great many new ones yet to be 

 named. Not in Europe I believe, nor to a much greater extent in 

 America, but in that vast region known vaguely as "foreign lands," 

 where all that has been done with mycology is but a small beginning. 

 Any one who secures extensive material from these "foreign lands" 

 and attempts to monograph it after he has learned as far as possible 

 all that is known on the special subject, will be embarrassed with the 

 forms he finds for which he has no names. By far the greater part 

 of foreign material consists of rpecies widely distributed and common 

 in Europe and America, but a large part of the species of these foreign 

 lands that are in any degree local are as yet unknown. If these foreign 

 lands are worked in future as at present, Saccardo's "sixty thousand" 

 names will be swollen to one hundred and sixty thousand before he is 

 through with it. There is no way of even guessing approximately the 

 number of species that exist that are good. If I were to guess on the 

 Gastromycetes, basing my guess on what I have learned in the six 

 or seven years I have worked on this one subject I should guess about 

 five hundred. Over a thousand are included in Saccardo now, but 

 I think about one out of three is "good," and that there are enough 

 additional not known to make up the half. On this basis there would 

 be about 30,000 fungi if all were correctly known. 



NEW GENERA. I note in a recent pamphlet that some more "new 

 genera have been discovered. "Derminus" for Crepidotus, Galera and Hebe- 

 loma. Agaricus for the white-sppred species. "Hyporhodius" for Platens, 

 Claudopus, etc. I wonder whose pipe dream these are. Smoke up. The num- 

 ber of 'new genera" you can discover by this system of juggling is only lim- 

 ited by your ability to invent new names. 



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