CHAPTEE X 



FUNGI IN GENERAL 



Concise and accurate definitions are difficult to construct, and 

 seldom remain long without gathering about them numerous 

 exceptions. This is especially the case in botany or zoology, 

 where the continual accession of knowledge gradually renders 

 old limitations untenable. All the definitions in vogue with 

 old authors have one after the other been swept away; and 

 many of those which succeeded them are either gone or going. 

 Even the old distinctions between plant and animal are no 

 longer to be trusted, and subsidiary divisions are either diffuse 

 or vague. In the lower Cryptogamia there has been a great 

 shaking amongst the dry bones, so that when Algae, Lichens, and 

 Fungi are spoken of they no longer convey the same absolute 

 ideas which the same words represented only half a century 

 ago. Whether the hypothesis associated with the middle of 

 these three terms is tenable or not, the affinities between 

 Lichens and the Algae on the one hand, and with the Fungi on 

 the other, have been shown to be very intimate, and the 

 difficulties of delimitation increased. 



We have only to concern ourselves directly with Fungi, 

 and here the difficulty of concise definition soon becomes mani- 

 fest. We need not go back beyond the year 1835, when 

 Berkeley contributed a short introduction to the fifth volume 

 of Smith's English Flora, edited by W. J. Hooker, in which he 

 defined Fungi as " plants, consisting of cells and fibres, always 

 springing from organised, and generally decayed or decaying, 

 substances, not perfected when immersed in water, bearing 

 reproductive sporidia, either externally or internally, naked or 

 enclosed in variously formed cells, many of which frequently 



