



EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF INOCYBE 



Gertrude E. Douglas 



(with plates xviii-xxii) 



During a collecting trip with Professor Atkinson at Coy Glen, 

 near Ithaca, New York, on August 25, 1914, we came upon a large 

 quantity of Inocybe infelix in all stages of development. At that 

 time Professor Atkinson was particularly interested in obtaining 

 Inocybe material, as he had in mind the publication of a monograph 

 of the genus. He felt that, before the systematic relationship 

 could be determined with absolute certainty, there was need for 



1 



more morphological work on the developmental stages of these 

 plants. Accordingly he turned over this material to me as a 

 nucleus of a paper on the development of Inocybe. Two years 

 later, in July, while collecting fungi in the Adirondacks near 

 Seventh Lake, material of /. eutheloides and /. geophylla was 

 added, the latter collected by Miss Lena B. Walker. In the 

 following summer the same locality furnished /. hystrix, collected 

 by Professor Atkinson. The /. obscura material came from a 

 hard gravelly path in Coy Glen on September 24, 1916. 



All the Inocybe forms studied here are ground-inhabiting, and 

 were collected from places where the soil was compact and com- 

 paratively poor in humus. The determinations were made by 

 Professor Atkinson from mature plants springing up from the 

 same mycelium as the young buttons taken for study. 1 It is 

 certainly to be regretted that this paper was not put forward at 

 that time, before the untimely death of Professor Atkinson, who 

 felt so keenly the need of a closer cooperation of the systematist 

 with the morphologist in working out plant relationships. The 



r Plants were fixed in the field in medium chromo-acetic acid, care being taken to 

 remove as much of the soil as possible before dropping them into the fluid. The 

 washing afterward removed most of the gritty particles. After dehydration they 

 were cleared in cedar oil and imbedded in 52 paraffine. Sections were cut 5-7/4 in 

 thickness and stained with fuchsin, after having been previously treated with tannic 

 acid. This method had been found to be most satisfactory for photographing other 

 forms of agarics (9), and proved equally efficient in this case. 



211] 



Botanical Gazette, vol. 70 



