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NOTES ON SOME SOUTH AFRICAN ENTOMOPHTHOEACEAE. 
By S. H. Skaife. 
(With Plates II— IV.) 
The material on which the following notes are based was collected at 
Cedara, Natal, during the eight months August, 1919, to March, 1920. So 
far very few records of South African EntomopJitJioraceae have been pub- 
lished, the writings of Pole-Evans, Edington, Black and others on the locust 
fungus, Em/pusa grylli, being the only publications known to the present 
writer. 
The family EntomopJdhoraceae belongs to the order Entomophthorales 
and includes some fifty or more described species, the great majority of 
which are parasitic on insects. Only one other family, the Basidiobolaceae, 
all of the members of which are saprophytic or parasitic on the higher 
fungi, is included in this order. 
The two orders, EntomopJithorales and Mucorales, together make up the 
sub-class Zygomycetes of the great class of alga-like fungi, the Pliy corny cetes. 
These two orders agree with one another in that all the species included in 
them have isogamous sexual spores, but the Mucorales are distinguished by 
having the conidia borne in sporangia, whereas in the Entomoplithorales the 
conidia are borne singly and apically on club-shaped conidiophores. 
The family Entomophthoraceae has been subdivided into several genera, 
but some of these are of doubtful rank. Massospora, Peck, is an aberrant 
genus that, so far as present knowledge goes, is restricted to North 
America ; Tarichium, Cohn, no longer stands, as it seems to have been 
based on the resting stage of an Emp^isa ; and Nowakowski's genus. Lamia, 
is not valid, according to Thaxter, as the species on which it was founded, 
E. cuUcis, is a typical Empusa. 
We are thus left with two genera, Empusa and Entomophtliora. Thaxter, 
in his classical monograph (1), recognises only the genus Empusa, and 
regards EntomophtJwra as a sub-genus, characterised by the compound, 
branched conidiophores. More recent writers, however, recognise both 
genera, the species in which rhizoids are present being classed as Entomo- 
phthora, and those in which rhizoids are absent being placed in the genus 
Empusa (2). In the present paper the latter classification is followed. 
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