46 
NEW BOOK ON LEAF-FUNGI. 
Feb., 1889. 
The loss from floods all over the country has been greater 
of recent years than before, because of the higher cultivation 
of the land. This consideration alone suggests increased 
necessity for dealing with the question, and although some 
lands do not readily admit of the chief remedy proposed in 
these pages, it has been at least shown that some do, and 
these latter would not only be subject to less injury, but be 
better than they have ever been, hence the principle ought to 
receive as much support from owners and occupiers of land 
subject to floods as from the corporations of towns needing 
water. 
A NEW BOOK ON LEAF-FUNGI.* 
BY W. B. GROVE, B.A. 
For a long time the British workers on “ Leaf-Fungi ” 
have laboured under the greatest difficulties. With the 
exception of those who had access to Winter's “ Kryptogamen- 
Flora,” and a few isolated magazine articles, they have been 
left entirely in the dark about the great advances in knowledge 
obtained in recent years by those who have worked at the 
biology of this group. Bare descriptions of species are not 
knowledge, although they are the first and necessary 
preliminary thereto. But now, thanks to Mr. Plowright’s 
monograph, for the first time those mycologists who are 
confined to English books may enter upon the work of the 
year, with regard to Leaf-fungi, fully equipped for under¬ 
standing the characters and the relations of the species 
they meet with. 
These relations are now shown to be far less simple than 
had ever previously been suspected. The triumphant 
establishment of hetercecism , in which (pace Mr. Massee) I still 
think Mr. Plowright lias taken no mean share, has not only 
demonstrated that those leaders of mycologic opinion in this 
country who so long and so obstinately pooh-poohed it, were 
incapable of appreciating the evidence, but has also made it 
clear that the intermingling and intercrossing of species and 
host-plants is so complex that nothing but persistent artificial 
cultures can ever disentangle them. 
As an example we may take the species of Puccinia which 
grow upon Phragmites communis. These were formerly 
* A Monograph of the British UredineEe and Ustilagineae, with an 
account of their Biology, &c., by Charles B. Plowright. London : 
Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co., 1889, pp. 348, and eight plates; price 10/6. 
