8 



FAKLOW ON THE GYMNOSPORANGIA 



their species. Reess 1 is the most recent writer who has given the synonymy in detail, and 

 I have in most cases followed his account, and have only given in full the special Ameri- 

 can references. 



The greater part of the present paper is devoted to an account of the morphological 

 characters of the species of the two genera found in this country, and I have been unable 

 by means of cultures to arrive at as definite results as I should desire ; but a record of 

 one's failures is hardly less important, than an account of one's success. ' I have myself 

 collected large quantities of Gymnosporangia and Roesteliae in the region around Boston, 

 and I am greatly indebted to Mr. H. W. Ravenel, of Aiken, and Dr. J. H. Mellichamps of 

 Bluffton, for material from South Carolina; to Mr. J. B. Ellis of Newfield, N. J., and Mr. C. 

 H. Peck, the State Botanist of New York, for valuable notes as well as specimens ; to Mr. 

 C. B. Fuller for specimens from Portland, Me., and to Dr. H. W. Harkness for specimens 

 from California. I must particularly express my indebtedness to Dr. M. Cornu of 

 Paris, for his notes on European and American species, as well as for a valuable series of 

 specimens, and to Prof. C. Cramer, of Zurich. I have examined the specimens in Herb. 

 Curtis to which reference is made by Berkeley in Grevillea Vol. hi., p. 55-59, the speci- 

 mens in the Sprague collection of the Boston Society of Natural History, and some orig- 

 inal specimens of Schweinitz, which, however, were not in a good state of preservation, 

 besides numerous series of Fungi Exsiccati published in Europe and this country. 



Gtmnospoeangium De Cand. 



Spores yellow or orange-colored, usually two-celled, occasionally one- to six-celled, on 

 long hyaline pedicels, imbedded in a mass of jelly which when moistened swells into col- 

 umnar or irregularly expanded masses. Mycelium parasitic in the leaves and branches of 

 different Cupressineae, producing in them various distortions. 



The different genera in which the species of the present genus were placed by writers 

 previous to De Candolle, are given in detail in the paper of Reess and need not be repeated 

 here. The genus was first described by De Candolle from unpublished papers of Hedwig 

 in the Flore Frangaise, Vol. ii., 1805. Link 2 in 1809 separated the species in which the 

 gelatinous substance was more or less conical or cylindrical, from those in which it was 

 irregularly shaped, placing the former in Podisoma and retaining the latter in Gymnospor- 

 angium. The two genera'of Link have, until a comparatively recent time, been kept dis- 

 tinct by European writers, and they were adopted by Schweinitz in the Synopsis Fung. 

 Am. Bor., and by nearly all recent American writers. That the distinction depending 

 merely on the shape of the gelatinous masses should not be called generic, is the opinion of 

 probably a majority of the mycologists of the present day, although a number still keep 

 the genus Podisoma. Accepting Gymnosporangium in its widest sense as adopted by 

 European writers, we have a genus whose teleutospores are two-celled like those of Puc- 

 cinia, but invested with a variable amount of colored jelly which assumes a more or less 

 definite shape in the different species. Accepting also the opinion first advanced by Oer- 



1 Die Rostpilzforrnen der deutschen Coniferen. Abhandl. 2 Observationes in Ordinis plantarum, 1809. 

 Naturf. Gesellschaft. Vol. xi. Halle, 1869. 



