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 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 Thelephoracece 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 countries, or those described for their own country by 

 earlier students. The 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 and conspicuous resupinate fungi which had been 

 acciu-ately 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 Thelephoracece, are extremely dijfifi- 

 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 



