244 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [APRIL 
in the Elenchus (2:29), published five years later (1830), the first men- 
tion of the type species, Midotis lingua, appears. This fungus, 
which is described as growing ‘“‘ad basos truncorum” and as pos- 
sessing an inferior hymenium, has not been found again, so far as is 
known; and it seems quite uncertain what it may have been, or even 
if it were anything more than some well-known form growing under 
abnormal conditions. The only discomycete known to the writer 
which might be referred to Midotis, and which possesses a truly 
inferior hymenium, is a plant found growing on dead logs in Septem- 
ber, 1889, near New Haven, and again at Burbank; the material in 
the former locality being rather abundant. The apothecia are very 
thin, broadly spathulate, proliferous, and fasciculate, having a habit 
of growth very like that of some basidiomycete; the spores small and 
insignificant, and the inferior hymenium very characteristic and by 
no chance accidental. This plant, which has been provisionally 
referred to M. plicata Cke. & Hark., may perhaps really be a Midotis 
in the Friesian sense, on account of the unusual position of its hyme- 
nium; but that the other species included in the genus by various 
writers really belong here seems doubtful. The only species among 
these for the most part tropical forms, that the writer has examined, 
is the Cuban M. verruculosa B. & C., in which it is not possible to 
determine whether the hymenium is inferior or not. The status of 
Midotis itself being thus decidedly uncertain, it seems doubly unde- 
sirable to include in it the members of what at least appears to be a 
well-marked and peculiar genus. 
Within the past year Mr. MAsseE has been so kind as to send to 
the writer a small fragment of the type material of Wynnea macrotis 
and W. gigantea, and, as has already been mentioned, he has eel 
ined the specimens of the latter species in the Curtis Herbarium, 
which form a part of the original gathering of Borrert, and include 
one large and very well-developed example. None of these, how- 
ever, correspond very closely to the figures given by BERKELEY and 
Cooke, the apothecia, though somewhat more blunt than in the 
Carolina form, hardly presenting the thin, broadly spathulate, and 
freely proliferous habit represented in these drawings. Mr. MASSE 
informs me that in his opinion the Berkeleyan species are not spe- 
cifically distinct, although the color and habit of the two are s° very 
differently represented in the Micrographia. 
ahh age 
