834 . REPORT— 1897. 



in the commercial value of the answer. This is not our function, and our 

 advice and researches are the more valuable to commerce the less we are concerned 

 with it. 



It is clear that the magnitude of the subject referred to is far beyond the 

 measure of our purpose to-day, and I shall restrict myself to a short review of 

 some advances in our knowledge of the Fungi made during the last three decades. 



Little more than thirty years ago we knew practically nothing of the life-history 

 of a fungus, nothing of parasitism, of infectious diseases, or even of fermentation, 

 and many botanical ideas now familiar to most educated persons were as yet 

 nnbovn. Our knowledge of the physiology of nutrition was in its infancy, even 

 the significance of starches and sugars in the green-plant being as yet not under- 

 stood; rootz-hairs and their importance were hardly spoken of; words like heter- 

 cecism, symbiosis, mycorhiza, &c., did not exist, or the complex ideas they now 

 connote were not evolved. When we reflect on these facts, and remember that 

 bacteria were as yet merely curious * aniuialculfe,' that rusts and smuts were 

 generally supposed to be emanations of diseased states, and that ' spontaneous 

 generation ' was a hydra not yet destroyed, we obtain some notion of the condi- 

 tion of this subject about 1860. 



As with otlier groups of plants, so with the Fungi, the first studies were those 

 of collecting, naming and classifying, and prior to 1850 the few botanists who 

 concerned themselves with these cryptogams at all were systematists. So far as 

 the larger fungi are concerned, the classification attained a high degree of perfec- 

 tion from the point of view of an orderly arrangement of natural objects, and the 

 student of to-day may well look back at the keen observation and terse, vivid 

 descriptions of these older naturalists, which stands in sharp contrast to much of 

 the more slovenly and hurried descriptive work which followed. 



It may be remembered that even uow we rely mainly on the descriptions and 

 system of Fries (1821-1849) for our grouping of the forms alone considered as 

 fungi by most people, and indeed we may regard him as having done for fungi 

 what Linnceus did for flowering plants. 



But, as you are aware, a large proportion of the Fungi are microscopic, and in 

 spite of the" conscientious and beautiful work of several earlier observers, among 

 whom Corda stands pre-eminent, the classification and descriptions of the 

 thousands of forms were rapidly bringing the subject into chaos. 



The dawn of a new era in Mycology was preparing, however. A few isolated 

 observers had already begun the study of the development of Fungi, but their 

 work was neglected, till Persoon and Ehrenberg at the beginning of this century 

 again brought the subject into prominence, and then came a series of discoveries 

 destined to stimulate work in quite other directions. 



The Tulasnes may be said "to have brought the old period to a close and pre- 

 pared the way for the new one ; they combined the powers of accurate observation 

 with a marvellous faculty of delineation, and applied the anatomical method to 

 the study of fungi with more success than ever before. Their new departure, 

 however, is more evident in their selection of the parasitic fungi for study, and 

 you all know how indispensable we still find their drawings of the germinating- 

 spores of the Smuts and Rusts. It is difiicult to say which of their works is the 

 most masterly, but probably the study of the life-history of Claviceps imrpurea 

 deserves first place, though successive memoirs on the Uredineoe, Ustilagineae, 

 Peronosporeas, Tuberacete, and then that magnificent work the ' Selecta Fungorum 

 Carpologia,' cannot be forgotten. 



In England, Berkeley was the man to link the period previous to 1860 with 

 the present epoch. A systeraatist and observer of high power, and with a rare 

 faculty for appreciating the labours of others, this grand old naturalist did work 

 of unequalled value for the period, and the student who wishes to learn what was 

 the state of mycology about this time will find it nowhere better presented than 

 in Berkeley's works, one of which — his ' Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany ' — 

 is a classic. 



Like all classifications in botany, however, that of the Fungi now took two 

 courses: one in the hands of those who collated names and herbarium-specimens, 

 and proposed cut and dried, but necessary and from a certain point of view very 



