CONTROVERTED AGARICS. 
39 
meet many times more ; let us hope that we have each and all done 
something for the benefit of our successors, and that we shall 
leave the study of our favourite little corner in the science of 
botany better than we found it. Personally, I am thankful for all 
the encouragement and assistance which has been freely given to 
me by members of this Club in a long and anxious task. No one 
could have had more loyal and disinterested help. Had it not been 
for the Woolhope Club, and especially one of its most amiable and 
active members, whose loss we cannot cease to deplore, the 
“ Illustrations ” would never have been commenced, or brought so 
near to a successful close. 
Upon the conclusion of this paper the Rev. Canon Du Port 
said : — Ladies and gentlemen, — Dr. Cooke has just told us that it 
was at the suggestion of some members of the Woolhope Club, 
and especially of him whose memory, not only in this house, but 
also wherever the name of Woolhope is named, is still fresh and 
will always be respected and loved, that he was induced to under- 
take the publication of his “ Illustrations of British Fungi.” Not 
only every member of the Woolhope Club, but every mycologist 
also, is under the deepest obligation to Dr. Cooke for the produc- 
tion of this unprecedented work — the illustration not of a few pet 
species found by himself in all stages of growth, and hence easily 
determined, but the illustration of every species named in the 
author’s “ Handbook ” and “ quarumcunque aliarum.” The author 
has to-night confessed that there are a few mistakes in the 1,200 
plates already published ; and I believe that there are a few more 
that he has not yet discovered. How could it be otherwise ? But 
this does not in any way detract from the credit due to the author 
for boldness, accuracy, and industry. Did ever anybody see a first, 
or even a second or a third edition of a book on Phanerogamous 
Botany without a very large number of mistakes and misprints ? 
How much more easily will errors creep in, with how much greater 
difficulty will they be discovered, in a work on Cryptograms ? The 
proofs of Dr. Cooke’s illustrations could not be corrected by look- 
ing into a dictionary for the spelling of a word, or into a herbarium 
for a specimen of a plant; a delicate tint not rendered quite 
correctly here, the omission of a letter there, a name wholly mis- 
placed, and the fact overlooked. How could all these be avoided ? 
Besides all this liability to error due to the mere production of the 
work, there are errors that have crept into our nomenclature, and 
that are still, probably in some cases, being handed down by 
tradition, owing to the method in which names are sometimes 
assigned to specimens. Fungi are for the most part putrescent in 
a very rapid manner ; they are seldom in a condition to be profit- 
ably studied some weeks after they have been gathered, at one’s 
leisure, with description and plates at one’s side. There were no 
figures in existence of a great many before Dr. Cooke’s, but they 
had often to be named by some master in the hunting field itself, 
and often amidst such a list of freshly-gathered specimens that it 
