Krieger: History of Mycological Illustration 317 



In the eighteenth century things began to brighten. The evil 

 effects of the Thirty- Years War of the previous century were 

 disappearing; the coffers of the kings and of the merchants were 

 again filling with gold ; the men of science thrived. Vaillant 

 certainly looks prosperous enough in the portrait-engraving that 

 forms the frontispiece of his " Botanicon Parisiense" (1727). 

 But few fungi are figured in this work. Peziza acetabulum is 

 well done, and so, perhaps, is Cantharellus cibarius. The figure 

 of Amanita phalloides, on PI. 14, recalls the fact that Vaillant 

 is the author of the first fairly clear description of this deadliest 

 of all agarics. The engravings, which were done by Claude Aub- 

 riet, are unco'lored and very fine in execution ; yes, too fine, for 

 they show a finish that manicures and bedizens nature into a kind 

 of studied artificiality which must have pleased the artificial 

 people of his time. 



Two years later (1729) appeared the work of the great Italian, 

 Pier' Antonio Micheli, who was the first to point out definitely 

 that fungi have reproductive bodies or spores. With the excep- 

 tion of Robert Hooke's drawing of the teleutospore of a Phrag- 

 midium (1665) and Marsigli's demonstration (1714) of the origin 

 of fungi from mycelia, there is little in the literature before Micheli 

 to indicate that fungi were anything more than freaks of nature 

 produced by spontaneous generation or by thunderbolts, spooks, 

 and the like. Micheli's epoch-making " Nova Plantarum Genera " 

 (1729) changed the views of mycologists forever. Prof. A. H. 

 R. Buller, of the University of Manitoba, pays a glowing tribute 

 to this investigator in a paper entitled, " Micheli and the Dis- 

 covery of Reproduction in Fungi" (1915). In some plates, 

 carefully copied by Prof. Buller from the originals, are shown 

 gills, tubes, cystidia, basidia, and spores, of agarics and boleti. 

 The gill-fungi, described and illustrated by Micheli, have been 

 critically reviewed by his countryman, Martelli (1884&), in the 

 Nuovo Giornale Botanico Italiano. 



Before proceeding, I would also call your attention to a curious 

 drawing in Marsigli's work, the " Generatione Fungorum " 

 (1714). One of the plates represents some agarics — apparently 

 a species of Coprinus — growing from water in a flask, the neck 



