62 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 
soon taken up by microscopists. Many of the “‘ Amateur Botanists” 
joined the wuenert Club, and the older society dwindled and 
twenty co ined saikes, in which are Jou several of the 
larger engl and methods of cooking the edible ones. The plates 
manner. 
Cooke now Began to aspire to a real knowledge of fungi. He 
entered into correspondence with the two most eminent British 
mycologists of that date, M. J. Berkeley aad C. E. Broome, and 
obtained their help in many ways. His ener y soon bore fruit, 
papers on microscopic aa were written oy the Popular Science 
Review during 1863-4, and these were revised and expanded to form 
the well-known volume entitled Rust, Smut, Mildew and Mould: 
this introduction to the stu udy of microscopic fungi, which was 
inges 3 by J. E. Sowerby, is still used, and is probably the 
t of Cooke’s popular books. Another useful work was his 
of Science gic with which it had been issued: 
published his not very satisfactory Fern Book a ow rybody. 
In 1871 his Handbook of British Fungi was published in two 
volumes. 
Cooke had been publishing Fungi “iderneusaeae ba ets ae 
1865, and continued to do so until 1879; meanwhile he 
arranged the fangi | a the British Museum and aE ihe Bainburgh 
Gardens. The Handbook was an immediate success. The pros 
pectus had asked for subscribers at half-a-guinea, but the work 
extended from the six Spares pages promised to more than nine 
npedied, and from tw to Ne dele of four hundred. 
The Handbook staal the number of British fungi to 281 
ee es on the gone in Berkeley’ s Outlines of British 
‘ungology, published in 1860. The book is on traditional lines, and 
is the last complete Eng lish fungus flora : in the preface the author 
says: ‘Pursuing the heey of fungi as a recreation in the intervals 
