Mr. Romell is one of the men one can like through and through. 
He is as full of information regarding the fungi as an egg is of meat; 
modest, unassuming, he pursues the subject only from the love of 
acquiring knowledge. He is not engaged in any scheme of publication 
of “new species” or in juggling with the names of old. 
Mr. Romell has a boy that was a marvel to me. A lad perhaps 
twelve years old, he can tell the Latin name of every Swedish flowering 
plant. No doubt he inherits much of his aptitude, but I think he is 
not an exceptional case in Sweden. Botany, there, is a study required 
in the schools, and it is practical knowledge that is required. It is not 
the farce it is in the high schools generally in the United States. Is it 
any wonder that a nation that instills in the mind of every school boy 
a love of natural history should produce such men as Linnaeus and 
Fries? 
ELIAS FRIES. 
It is certainly no exaggeration to say that Fries was the most 
learned mycologist of his time, especially with regard to the Agarics. 
Fries made mistakes, no doubt, as everyone makes mistakes, but 
the fact remains that he made a close, practical study of Agarics 
for seventy years, in a country where they abound. He gave the world 
the result of his labors in a concise systematic manner; first acquiring 
a knowledge of his subject, and then describing his plants in the only 
way that plants should be described to be intelligently recognized, by 
contrast of the essential points of difference. 
The result is that Fries’ species are facts , they are tangible, they 
can be recognized. They are not, as alas is the case with too many 
of our modern “new species,” put forth with a few grains of truth, 
perhaps hidden in a mass of unimportant and confusing verbosity. 
Fries, I judge from the stories that still persist, was a positive 
man. He knew the Agarics as no man probably ever knew them before, 
and he was conscious of it. His method of work is probably the best— 
to study and make notes of the plants in the woods where they grow— 
but, unfortunately, he often neglected to keep specimens of the fleshy 
fungi and depended almost entirely on his notes. The plants that grow 
in Sweden to-day do not all of them conform strictly to Fries’ descrip¬ 
tions. There are minor discrepancies due probably to the fact that 
when he came to publish he found lapses in his notes which he 
supplied from memory or from illustrations that he referred to the 
species.* But in spite of these minor discrepancies Fries gave 
the world the only reasonably complete and systematic work on 
Agarics that exists. I believe if the efforts of mycologists to-day 
were put forth chiefly to find out what Fries’ plants are, then to adopt 
in the main the names he used, to correct the minor faults of descrip¬ 
tion and classification he made, and to better illustrate his plants, 
much more rapid progress would be made toward a knowledge of the 
subject. With exception of the spores Fries did not lay much stress 
upon the color. He required that his species must have some marked 
*It is difficult otherwise to explain a number of obvious errors such as the spores of Calocera 
viscosa are “white;” those of nepiota nauciua are “globose;” the gills of Russula lutea are 
‘‘narrow.” etc. 
161 
