128 
Mycologia 
for spores. With this for an explanation it was possible for us to 
make his name pyriforme apply to a similar looking species com- 
mon in that range which had ordinary, small, ellipsoid spores. 
The species to which we made his name apply was the one which 
has since been culturally connected with Cronartium Comptoniae. 
Recently when a fresh specimen, collected in British Columbia 
and communicated to us by W. P. Fraser, with an apparent abun- 
dance of spores dropping off in heaps of orange-yellow powder, 
was examined, we were surprised to find in the first mount only 
large pyriform bodies. An attempt to regard them as peridial 
cells not only seemed futile from the first, but was soon rendered 
impossible by the finding of unmistakable peridial tissue composed 
of very different cells. An undetermined specimen on a branch of 
Pinns Banksiana collected in Wisconsin in 1907 by J. J. Davis 
was next thought of. This is an old weathered specimen without 
any visible sign of peridia but it was remembered that an exami- 
nation had showed pyriform cells very like the fresh ones then 
being studied. In both these specimens these pyriform cells had 
a low verrucose sculpturing very unlike peridial cells, and since 
their shape and size agreed precisely with Peck’s original descrip- 
tion the belief that we were dealing here with a characteristic and 
practically unknown species, except for the obscure type, was 
gradually forced upon iis. Fortunately within a few days some 
fresh specimens received from Colorado collected by E. Bethel 
added to our supply of this striking species. These developments 
gave impetus to the study and we next turned to the herbarium to 
see if any specimens belonging here might have been placed 
erroneously, and carelessly, in some other species. Our suspi- 
cions were well founded, and we were soon able to add South 
Dakota, Washington, and Alberta to our list of localities. We 
were soon able to secure spores from the type specimen in the 
Museum at Albany, N. Y., which abundantly confirmed Peck’s 
original description, and our recent inferences. 
The next problem to present itself was very naturally the ques- 
tion of an alternate phase. According to our new conception we 
had a P eridermium species distributed across the continent from 
New Jersey to British Columbia with enough intermediate locali- 
ties to make the distribution continuous throughout the range. 
