Memoirs of the Torrey Botanical Club (Volume 14, No. 1) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A monograph of the genera Chaetomium and Ascotricha A. H. Chivers (with Plates 6-17) Introduction In 1902 the writer attempted to arrange and classify a considerable number of specimens of Chaetomium which were then in his herbarium at Hanover, New Hampshire, and which were collected by him in various localities in New England. At that time the only available monograph was the well-known work of Zopf (113) which contained descriptions of ten species only. While it was possible to identify certain forms in the collection, others were laid aside until more information could be obtained. The study of these first collections, however, aroused so much interest that the writer was led to continue his work on these fungi, and since that time he has been engaged in the preparation of an illustrated monograph of the genus. It became evident from further examination of the literature that no adequate work on the genus was available, and that from a systematic standpoint it had become greatly confused owing to the multiplication of species which are either synonyms, in many cases even of species not belonging to this genus, or are described without recognizable figures or full and comparative descriptions. Some time after, when this work was well under way, a monograph of the genus by Bainier (3) appeared, in which twenty- two species and three varieties were described and illustrated, some of which proved to be American, while twelve species and two varieties were described as new. This monograph, although in some respects more comprehensive, was nevertheless like that of Zopf by no means complete. No mention was made of work by American authors or with two exceptions of English literature on the subject, while the repeated use for new species of names already preoccupied in...