vi Preface. 
With this object, the materials from which the following 
pages are compiled have been collected from the various 
handbooks, transactions, pamphlets, and periodicals in 
which .the several authors have published their work. 
This has been a task of some little difficulty, and has 
taken several years to accomplish. It has been my en- 
deavour in all cases to acknowledge the individual work 
of each author, but has not always been possible for me to 
do so. 
The descriptions of the species are in the main those 
of the late Dr. Winter in the new edition of Rabenhorst’s 
“Kryptogamen-Flora,” although I have not scrupled to 
amend them in various ways, partly from my own observa- 
tions, and partly from the writings of others. The arrange- 
ment of the species is that first proposed by Dr. J. Schréter 
and employed by Winter in the above-named work, to 
which I must refer the student for the descriptions of those 
European species which are not known to be British, as 
well as for the full details of the synonymy of those 
described in the present work. As the present generation 
of British students owe their knowledge almost exclusively 
to the writings of Dr. M. C. Cooke, the synonymy of his 
two works, “The Handbook of British Fungi,” and “ Micro- 
scopic Fungi,” is given in full. The synonymy of the 
older British botanists has, however, not been omitted. 
The biology of the Uredinez is, in the main, the work 
of the late Professor De Bary, and of the Ustilaginez that 
of Von Waldheim, Brefeld, and Schréter. During the past 
seven years I have devoted much time to these two groups 
of fungi, and have made between nine hundred and a 
thousand experimental cultures, with the object of working 
out the life-history of those species of which it was unknown, 
