
MYCOLOGY AS A BRANCH OF NATURE- 
STUDY. | 
By fohn Frederick Rayner. 
By way of preface to a plea for Mycology as a branch of 
Nature-study, it may be well to say a word about Nature-study 
itself. The rush to the towns, that portentous phenomenon of 
these latter days, has had far-reaching consequences, mostly 
bad. I do not forget that civilization, as the very word implies, 
came from town life, but civilization, like other things, may be 
bought at too high a price. Many observers are becoming 
alarmed about it. So lately as 1850 at least half of our popula- 
tion were engaged in agricultural pursuits, but now—we have it 
on the authority of one who cannot at any rate be called an 
alarmist, the Duke of Devonshire—77 per cent. labour, or do 
not labour, in the towns. Small wonder if so immense a trans- 
migration should call forth the warnings of our modern 
Cassandras. It is the subject of anxious discussion at Church 
Congresses, at May Meetings, at Medical Association gather- 
ings, in Parliament itself. It is declared to be laden with all 
manner of evils, physical, mental, moral and economic. The 
doctors tell us we are degenerating for want of pure air, our 
boasted sanitary improvements to the contrary notwithstanding. 
They say that one out of every five is tuberculous, that our jaws 
and our lungs are shrinking, our hair and teeth leaving us, our 
nerves shattered, the percentage of suicides increasing year by 
year; and as for lunacy, a problem of the near future will be 
the housing of the mentally afflicted. Some point to the de- 
clning birth-rate as a sign of national decay; others remind us 
that in spite of successive lowerings of the recruiting standard, 
sixty per cent. of candidates for military service have to be 
rejected as physically unfit. Our spiritual guides lament the 
{nvolity of the age, the craving for change and excitement, the 
sensational and scrappy press, the garish and crowded public- 
house, the monstrous “gates” for professional football. Our 
politicians are aghast at the decay of agriculture, the lack of 
labourers, the inertia and want of enterprise on the part of those 
Who still remain on the land, while the problem of the urban 
unemployed impels to novel and revolutionary legislation. But 
the Unemployed Act is fortunately only one of many signs of 
counteraction: witness the Garden City movement, the fashion 






