COLLECTING FUNGI IN THE ADIRONDACKS. 
Dr. N. L. Britton, Drrector-1n-CHIEF. 
Sir: Following your instructions, I spent the last half of July 
and the first half of October, of the season just passed, in the 
Adirondack Mountains making a general collection of fungi. An 
attempt was made to get complete descriptive notes from the 
fresh specimens of most of the gill-fungi collected, to be used 
later in publication, and in this I was assisted by Mrs. Murrill, 
who made sketches of many of them in their natural colors. 
Lake Placid was selected as a base and excursions were made 
by boat and otherwise to desirable collecting regions in the 
vicinity. Many different kinds of localities were visited, such 
as pure forests of pine, balsam, and spruce, tamarack swamps, 
sphagnum bogs, sugar-maple groves, deciduous woods, mixed 
coniferous and deciduous woods, open fields, and exposed, mossy 
hilltops. The higher mountains were not visited because we 
were not there at the proper season for collecting above three 
thousand feet. It was not our expectation to add many novelties 
to the known fungous flora of North Elba after the long and 
brilliant work of Dr. Charles H. Peck, state botanist, in that 
region, but we hoped to increase our knowledge of this flora 
and to enrich the Garden herbarium with well selected and well 
preserved specimens of as many species as possible. 
The collection obtained was greater than we had expected, 
comprising 1,175 field numbers and about 2,000 specimens. 
any of these grew on living tree trunks and fallen timber and 
are of special interest in connection with the care and protection 
of the state forests situated in the Adirondacks. Others repre- 
sent edible or poisonous species of gill-fungi and are interesting 
to those who advocate a wider use of members of this group of 
plants for food. A majority of the species are different from 
those found in the vicinity of New York City, belonging as: they 
do to a more northerly phytogeographic area extending from 
eastern Canada and New England westward to the prairies and 
southward along the Alleghanies. The fungi of this area have 
