A SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF MYCO- 

 LOGICAL ILLUSTRATION 

 (HIGHER FUNGI) 1 



Louis C. C. Krieger 

 (WiTh Plates 24-31) 



Every taxonomist will admit that illustrations are essential 

 for the identification of many plants, and especially in the case 

 of the fleshy, perishable fungi. To be really serviceable, how- 

 ever, a picture must be truthful. This seems self-evident, yet, 

 if we make a survey of the available mycological illustrations 

 from the earliest times to the present, we find that this quality 

 of truthfulness was slow to develop. One of the causes of this 

 is to be found in the freedom of the illustrator in following his 

 imagination and another in the technical difficulties. 



Like children, the old herbalists felt free to add fanciful em- 

 bellishments to their pictures of plants. Porta's cuts are a good 

 example. But the palm for nature-faking illustrating belongs 

 to one Dr. Seger, who published (1671) under the name, Anthro- 

 pomorphus, a cut of a " geaster," the open exoperidium of which 

 discloses some miniature men and women, all apparently glad 

 to glimpse the world after their imprisonment within the tissues 

 of the plant (PL 24) . In order to outdo the advocates of priority 

 in nomenclature, our friend C. G. Lloyd of Cincinnati (1906&), 

 has proposed (jocularly, of course, and under the nom de 

 plume, "McGinty") to adopt Seger's name, Anthropomorphous, 

 for the much later Geaster of Micheli (1729). (In parenthesis 

 I may say that a super-conscientious systematist, in Europe, is 

 said to have complained of his inability to find the name of this 

 authority, "McGinty," in the literature of botany.) Another 

 figure of Seger's, a Xylaria-like plant, would make a good il- 

 lustration in a gynecological book. 



1 An illustrated paper read before the Botanical Society of Washington 

 (D. C), December 6, 1921. 



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