26 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF 
from year to year, if we would reap the true reward of 
our labours. 
At the period when Schweinitz and Albertini wrote, 
there had been recently broached, in some of the Ger¬ 
man journals, particularly Voight’s Magazine, certain 
monstrous hypotheses, concerning the very nature of the 
fungi, and “ which one could scarcely credit his senses 
in perusing —hypotheses which ascribed the existence 
of several species of these plants to mutations of form, 
and to a diseased condition of one and the same species of 
Zoophyta; alleging that the Tubulina fragiforma was 
nothing more than the progeny of the Phallus impudi- 
cus , which, growing old, .at length became metamor¬ 
phosed into the Lichen paschalis ; thus, in the mere 
wantonness of authorship, confounding, with one scrawd 
of the pen, two great classes of the vegetable world, 
and blending both into the animal kingdom. This 
was to make vegetable life, indeed, Protean. The like 
undiscriminating heedlessness had led the writer to 
assure his readers that a fungus discovered by Hoffman, 
in the Trichoderma roseum , furnished with curious 
and delicate little filaments, was nothing more than a 
zoophyte, with six arms. Against these, and many 
similar heresies and hallucinations, the authors do not 
fail to caution their readers. 
This work was prepared under several disadvantages. 
The German writers on cr^ptogarnia had, it is true, 
been found of great service in determining nice and dif¬ 
ficult questions, and to them Albertini and Schweinitz 
repeatedly acknowledged their obligations; but they 
