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of holidays under canvas, the agricultural colonies of the Saly- 
tion and Church Armies, the enormous vogue of Boa 
Wagner’s “ Simple Life,” the great multiplication of books er 
periodicals dealing with gardening, botanical and tural topics 
and last, but not least, the adoption of Nature-study in our 
schools. Now some of these evils may be exaggerated, some of 
the remedies futile, but we may claim this for Nature-study, that 
it gives at least a hint to the rising generation that there are 
other objects of interest in the world besides those which towns 
afford. It stimulates a love for the things of the country with- 
out which it were vain to hope that our people will be persuaded 
to retrace their steps countrywards. But I waste time in preach. 
ing to the converted. Nature-study has come to stay, and you 
and I are glad. My business this evening is to impress upon 
schoolmasters and all concerned the claims of our own pet sub- 
ject, Mycology to wit. 
Nature-study as frequently, | might perhaps say generally 
taught, resolves itself into Botany, by reason chiefly of the 
greater accessibility of material than either Zoology or Geology 
can offer; and the botany of our schools and Nature-study 
classes is mostly restricted to the flowering plants, often indeed 
only to the more conspicuous of these—the grasses, sedges and 
rushes being frequently neglected, a neglect of which indeed 
not a few among older botanists are found guilty. Now I wish to 
show cause why these boundaries should be enlarged. I do not 
mean to infer that all possible work within these boundaries has 
been or is being done, but at any rate the study of the flowering 
plants is limited by the season, and that season is succeeded by 
the season of Cryptogams. On the arrival of the “ glorious 
First” the Phanerogams can offer little that is fresh to the 
wandering gaze of the youthful botanist, unless it be materials 
for the study of seed-dispersal or specimens for the examination 
of abscission-layers—but now come troops of new and strange 
forms of plant-life. I put aside for the present the Mosses, the 
Lichens and the Algae. Their structure and life-history have 
indeed attractions of their own, but call for the regular use of 
the compound microscope, and are hardly, to my thinking, so 
well fitted to engage the attention of the young naturalist as 
are the larger Fungi. Besides the “ infinite variety ” in form and 
colour of the Fungi, besides the large size, the fleshy substance, 
and the exceeding beauty of very many of them: besides the 
suddenness of their appearance and the rapidity of their growth, 
there is their strange and mysterious character. The student 
learns that there are plants without leaves, roots or flowers, 
plants devoid of that distinctive characteristic of plant-life, 
chlorophyll—a group unique on that account. He finds himself 
dealing with structures whose cell-formation proves their kin- 
