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Report on Botany. 



mosses, lichens and algae no successful attempt had been 

 made to give us a manual of fungi. It may not be out of 

 place to allude briefly to some of these difficulties. Not 

 that we would discourage any or divert them from the pur- 

 suit of this most interesting branch of botany, we desire 

 rather to encourage and commend, but because difficulties 

 are more easily overcome when we know exactly where 

 they are, and what they are, and because in this way the 

 direction in which efforts should be made to elucidate and 

 simplify the subject may be indicated. 



The vast number of the species with which the student 

 should form an acquaintance has tended to retard the de- 

 velopment of the science of mycology. The species of 

 fungi outnumber all the other cryptogams combined. The 

 British species now known exceed twenty-eight hundred. 

 The North Carolina species, according to Dr. Curtis, are 

 more than twenty-three hundred, but all the other crypto- 

 gams of that state are not quite six hundred. In our own 

 state the fungi now known are about thirteen hundred 

 species, but little less than twice the number of the re- 

 maining cryptogams, and almost as many as the species 

 of flowering plants. In the introduction to Centuries of 

 North American Ftuuji, published by Kev. M. J. Berkeley 

 and Kev. M. A. Curtis, in the Annals and Magazine of 

 Natural History, they say : " It was intended, at first, to 

 publish the whole in an especial work dedicated to North 

 American Mycology, hut it was found impossible to pre- 

 pare so voluminous a book as a complete account of the 

 Fungi of the United States, within any fixed time, and we 

 have, therefore, thought it right to publish the multitudes 

 of new species which exist in our Herbaria, by way of 

 Prodromus." 



The immense Dumber of species in some genera is a 

 source of difficulty. It is well known to botanists, that 

 those genera which abound in species are the most diffi- 



