160 
CONFERENCE NOTES. 
At the conference meeting held in the library on May 4 Mr. 
George V. Nash exhibited two living plants in flower of the genus 
Cattleya. He remarked that this genus of orchids was distrib- 
uted from Central America to southern Brazil, being especially 
numerous in the Andes. One of the plants exhibited was Cattleya 
Skinneri, from Gautemala and Costa Rica. The other was a 
form of this nearly white. This white-flowered form led the 
speaker to remark upon the occurrence of such forms among the 
orchids. He stated they were known in a great many species. 
One of the most recent known occurrences was a white form of 
Cattleya Gigas, which had come into flower at the establishment 
of Messrs. Lager & Hurrell, at Summit, N. J. This was the 
first white-flowered form of this species known, and the speaker 
aa aves that the owners held the plant at $2,000. 
A. Murrill read by title a paper on the Polyporaceae of 
ae maica, eontsame a record of 115 species. This paper will 
appear later in MYCOLOGIA. 
Dr. Charles H. Thom, mycologist in cheese investigation for 
the United States Department of Agriculture, gave a discussion 
of the relation of certain moulds to the process of cheese ripening. 
From the standpoint of the biologist cheeses may be grouped 
into two classes: (1) Those ripened by molds, (2) those ripened 
by bacteria. By far the larger part of the five hundred or more 
kinds of cheese belong to the class in which bacteria play the 
predominant part in the ripening process. But there are a small 
number of varieties and these including some of the best known of 
all kinds, in which mycelial fungi play the most important réle. 
A study of these cheeses has been conducted jointly by the 
United States Department of Agriculture and by the Storrs Agri- 
cultural Experiment Station at Storrs, Conn., for the past six 
years. 
The mould-ripened cheeses fall into two groups—those with 
the mould on the outside and forming a distinct rind and those 
with the mould forming green streaks inside the cheese. 
The first class is represented by two famous French varieties 
