8 Anniversary Address. 



may be the means of extracting from them many useful 

 remedies for some of the evils which perhaps they themselves 

 occasion. One would have a peculiar pleasure in seeing 

 them " hoist with their own petard." But at present 

 medicine acknowledges only one useful agent derived from 

 the family of Fungi — the well-known Ergot. Not that 

 even its properties are entirely beneficial. In some places it 

 attacks the rye so inveterately that the inhabitants in con- 

 sequence of daily eating the ergotizecl bread are liable to a 

 species of gangrene. I saw lately in Norway a small patch 

 of rye in which there was hardly a sound ear to be found ; 

 almost all were so covered with large horns of ergot as 

 apparently to be useless for food. With this example before 

 us there is no reason to suppose that other equally powerful 

 and valuable remedies may not yet be deduced from the 

 same form of vegetable life. 



Let it be conceded then that there is both a scientific and 

 a utilitarian interest in Fungi, how are we to set about the 

 study of them ? I think the natural order is to proceed from 

 the study of the larger to that of the smaller, and not to 

 begin with the microscopic species. Fries, the most illustrious 

 of all students of mycology, recommends the study of the 

 larger and more perfect forms first, and he even goes the 

 length of saying, in the preface to the second volume of his 

 Monographia, that the forms of leaf Fungi are so numerous 

 as to make it doubtful whether they are even worthy of 

 special names. Astronomers, he reminds us, do not give a 

 name to ever} 7 minute star which the telescope alone can 

 detect. Beginning accordingly with the Hymenomycetes, a 

 division embracing those Fungi which have an external 

 hymenium , and whose spores are not enclosed in asci, and 

 comprising the great orders ofAgaricini and Polyporei with 

 the smaller ones of Hydnei, Thelephorei, Clavariei, and 

 Tremellinei, I notice first the books that will be most 

 helpful. Less than 30 years ago the student of mycology 

 was in a very different position from what we find ourselves 

 in to-day. He had to struggle on without the assistance of 

 any book that gave an adequate account of British Fungi. 



