326 
WILLIAM A. MURRILL 
they might be suggestive and lead to more careful morphologic 
research. 
The many changes made in generic and specific names are to be 
deplored, but they are unavoidable. As already intimated, the systems 
of classification in vogue in Europe were not in harmony and were 
based on different conceptions from ours, so that they had to be 
worked over and adapted to our needs. The American code of 
nomenclature adopted for North American Flora over a decade ago 
has been found to work remarkably well and we see no reason to change 
it, even if such a thing were possible, for the set of compromise rules 
recently formulated which will never be consistently followed anywhere 
in the world. People ask me why I take up Melanoleuca for dear old 
Tricholoma, not knowing that Bentham used Tricholoma for a genus 
of flowering plants as early as 1820. They say it is a shame to discard 
Amanita and use Venenaritis for our most poisonous mushrooms, little 
dreaming that in the long ago Amanita and Agaricus meant the same 
thing and we could not keep them both. It is not my fault that the 
old fellows did their work so poorly and with such a delightful dis- 
regard of priority rights. 
Neither is it my fault that American material has been so poorly 
determined by European mycologists. They have no more interest 
in America than we have in the Fiji Islands or in Timbuctoo, and 
when they receive our specimens they are very apt to be reminded of 
a similar European species and be satisfied with that. Then, there is 
the great difficulty in studying dried specimens of fleshy fungi unless 
one has seen them in the fresh state. Specimens lose something in 
drying that can never be replaced. That is why I have often sat up 
half the night over the drying oven when the hunting was good in one 
of those far-off, wild, and virgin forests somewhere " in North America 
or Europe. 
I wish now to bring to your attention the system of classification 
I am using for the gill-fungi. Much time might be devoted to the 
grouping, the characters, and the descriptive terms employed, but a 
prolonged discussion of these details would only weary you. I prefer 
rather to outline briefly the main groups of this family and to illustrate 
them with colored slides of some of the more common and interesting 
species.* 
New York Botanical Garden. 
* At the conclusion of the paper, lantern slides were used to illustrate the classi- 
fication of the gill-fungi. 
