Catalogue of Fungi

...division or true system is possible, one will not look for it here in vain either. For this purpose, however, precise suborders serve above all, especially in the larger genera, whereby not only is the search facilitated, but the knowledge of certain things is also secured. In this way, even according to the hint and with the assistance of Nature, the general characteristic is more securely determined down to the most specific, the order down to the variety, in its concepts; and one obtains through this a far more beautiful prospect of the manifold and, so to speak, artificial distribution and subordination of the Creator than if one places a thousand descriptions, extended to the point of exhaustion, coldly next to one another in a row. And this is exactly what one seems to find lacking in most. Partly, one finds no descriptions at all, or inconsistent and unnatural, or overly circular ones. Even Linnaeus, who in his entirety is far above my praise and above the changes of human dispositions, could not pursue and process the colossal work he had chosen as his subject with equal strength everywhere. This seems to me to be the case especially with the amphibians, the animals of the class of worms which are neither bone-bearing nor shelled animals, and with the fungi, where it often seems as if labor and laborious diligence had taken the place of the genius so visible in the others. The great man became impatient with the monstrous proliferations of species through variations which the ancients were so fond of undertaking, and as a result, he pressed all his concepts together so forcefully that one is very often not in a position to decipher his opinion, because the key, his original train of thought, is missing. Thus, we find no single subdivision among the great multitude of those gilled fungi, as natural as they could have been, and many of the fungi which are present in illustrations...