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WILLIAM A. MURRILL 
$50,000, to carry out such an undertaking. Artists would have to 
paint the plants in the fresh condition where they grow and this would 
necessitate reaching various parts of the country during the growing 
season, although a large beginning might be made in any given locality. 
The plates should be prepared and reproduced in the best possible 
manner, and accompanied by accurate and comprehensive descriptive 
text. Such a work would be useful to the forester who wishes to protect 
his trees from wood-destroying fungi, to the collector of edible mush- 
rooms who wishes to use them for food and to guard against poisonous 
species, to the student in college or university, and to the general 
nature-lover in whatever part of the country he might live. There is 
nothing that would give a greater impetus to the study of fungi in all 
parts of North America than the publication of such a great illustrated 
work. 
The Classification of the Gill-fungi 
Coming now to a discussion of the taxonomy of the Agaricaceae in 
a more limited sense, the history of mycology in Europe shows that 
some of the older men, like Schaeffer and Bulliard, devoted their 
attention to describing and illustrating species and thought very 
little about genera; while others, like Persoon, Roussel, Gray, and 
Fries, attempted to improve upon the rather primitive divisions of 
Linnaeus. Then came the general adoption of the Friesian classi- 
fication through the publication and wide distribution of the Systema 
and Saccardo's Sylloge, followed by demands for improvement from 
Quelet and Patouillard in France, Karsten in Finland, Hennings in 
Germany, and Underwood and Earle in America. 
When one travels from country to country and from one herbarium 
to another, he gets accustomed to changing his nomenclature as he 
does his language and his money. The claim of ''existing usage" 
put forward by some has no value whatever unless it refers to the 
names used in Saccardo's work, which is merely a convenient, though 
disorderly, compilation of species as they are published, arranged 
according to a system in vogue when the work was started many 
decades ago. Karsten, a pupil of Fries, questioned the latter's classi- 
fication because based on too few characters. Patouillard and Fayod 
considered microscopic characters of great importance, while Maire 
goes so far as to include cytological characters. 
What we need in America is a classification that is impartial, 
practical, and modern, including all the improvements possible and 
