PREFACE 



This book is the outcome of twenty-seven years' experience, as a 

 teacher of botany, during which fifteen years have been given to a 

 graduate course on the morphology, classification and physiology of the 

 fungi, and five years to a course which combined with this considera- 

 tion a parallel study of the most important cultural and inoculation 

 methods used by the practical bacteriologist and mycologist at the 

 present day. The English and Germans have led in the production 

 of text-books on mycology and pathology; Berkeley, Smith, Cooke 

 and Massee in England, Frank, Sorauer, von Tubeuf and Kiister in 

 Germany. Americans have been behind in this important field, 

 notwithstanding, that American plants harbor some of the most 

 destructive fungi, which, through our careless methods of agriculture 

 and horticulture up to the present, are annually destructive to the 

 extent of millions of dollars. This lack is being rapidly remedied and 

 the appearance of text-books by Duggar, Stevens, Hall and' Stevens, 

 Mel T. Cook and general monographs by Erwin T. Smith, and others, 

 augurs well for the future of this line of literary and scientific labor. 

 The bacteriologists have led and mycologists should follow. 



The following pages represent in a much extended form the lectures 

 and laboratory exercises given by the author before his botanic classes 

 at the University of Pennsylvania, and before public audiences else- 

 where, especially, Farmers' Institutes with which he has had three 

 years' experience as a lecturer in Pennsylvania. The arrangement of 

 the text has been suggested by the needs of the classroom and from an 

 acquaintance with similar work in other colleges and universities in 

 America. It is hoped that the book and the suggestions, as to teaching 

 which it contains, will appeal to those responsible for similar courses. 

 The keys are given with the anticipation that they will prove useful 

 to the student and teacher who desire exercises in the classification of 

 the fungi: The illustrations have been chosen with care, and credit is 

 given in all cases for those borrowed from other books and monographs. 

 The author hopes that the book is reasonably free from misleading 



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