SECTION K.— BOTANY. 



SEX AND NUTRITION IN THE FUNGI. 



ADDRESS BY 



PROF. DAME HELEN GWYNNE-VAUGHAN, D.B.E., D.Sc, LL.D., 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



I THINK all members of Section K know the unhappy reason which prevents 

 us to-day from hearing an address from the President of our choice, and 

 I am sure that I may convey to Prof. R. H. Yapp our sincere sympathy 

 and regret and our cordial hopes for his speedy recovery. I came into 

 the picture because I had been appointed a vice-president, and that, I 

 am proud to remember, was largely due to the association of my husband's 

 name with the University of Glasgow. 



At the last Glasgow meeting in 1901 the President of the section was 

 Prof. Bayley Balfour, whose memorial we shall see unveiled on Saturday. 

 He referred to the excellent quarters in which we find ourselves as ' this 

 magnificent Botanical Institute ' opened ' a few months ago . . . with 

 all the distinction that the presence of our veteran botanist. Sir Joseph 

 Hooker . . . could give to the ceremony.' Much has changed in the inter- 

 vening twenty-seven years, but not the hospitality of the Department of 

 Botany in Glasgow. Some of the changes in botanical outlook are vividly 

 brought home to a reader of the presidential address on angiosperms in 

 1901, a period when triple fusion was new and pteridosperms were 

 unknown. 



My first duty is to refer to the botanical losses of the year. Benjamin 

 Daydon Jackson died, as the result of an accident, after sixty years of 

 unremitting work on botany ; William Charles Frank Newton was near 

 the beginning of his scientific career, but had already done enough to make 

 his loss a heavy one. Edward Francis Linton and Robert Miller Christy 

 will be remembered for their work on British plants, and Sir Harry 

 Johnston for his collections and discoveries overseas. 



Apart from two brilliant addresses on plant pathology by Marshall 

 Ward in 1897 and V. H. Blackman in 1924, the fungi have never been 

 the subject of a presidential address in Section K. Last year the President 

 dealt with the elementary types of holophytic plant life, and traced their 

 origin from the pigmented Flagellata ; it is not inappropriate that we 

 should turn to-day to saprophytic and parasitic forms. 



These have often been assumed to be derived in small groups from 

 diverse phyla of green plants, but increasing knowledge of the fungi has 

 emphasised the characters that they have in common, and has shown 

 many of their resemblances to the higher algae to be superficial, examples 

 of homoplasy rather than homology. There are exceptions to this as to 



