VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 4 
BOTANICAL GAZETTE 
“APRIL, 1905 
CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE CRYPTOGAMIC LABORA- 
TORY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY. LX. 
A NEW AMERICAN SPECIES OF WYNNEA. 
ROLAND THAXTER. 
(WITH PLATES IV AND V) 
In the third volume of Hooxer’s Journal of Botany and Kew 
Garden Miscellany (1851) BERKELEY published a description without 
figures of a large and striking discomycetous fungus, distinguished 
by the possession of long ear- or spoon-shaped apothecia, arising in a 
fasciculate fashion from a well-developed common stem. This form, 
which was said to have been found abundantly on rotten wood near 
Darjeeling, India, he placed in‘ the then very comprehensive genus 
Peziza, comparing it to Peziza onotica and P. leporina, and designating 
it as P. macrotis. Some years later, however, having received from 
Dr. Curtis a closely related North American species collected by 
Botrert near Orizaba, Mexico, he was led to create the new genus 
Wynnea for the reception of these two forms (Jour. Linn. Soc. 
9:1866), the Mexican species being used as the type under the name 
Wynnea gigantea. Both species were subsequently illustrated by 
Cooke in his M icrographia, the colors being no doubt guessed at 
from BERKELEY’s descriptions and from the dried specimens. W. 
macrotis is here said by CooKE to occur also in Mexico, but no author- 
~ ity for this statement is mentioned. During the forty years that have 
elapsed since the collection of W. gigantea by BotTert, there seems 
to have been no further mention of the occurrerice of these or of other 
species of Wynnea, and in more recent years the genus has been 
consigned to the limbo of synonymy by Saccarpo in his Sylloge, 
where both species are included in the genus Midotis. 
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