PREFACE. Vorrede.

covered, dead or bare ground

covered, dead, or bare: these fungi exhilarate the investigator on the foggy days of winter, and they accompany the arrival and departure of nature in spring and autumn. And then, I testify as one who has experienced it, they bestow upon their friends more joy than summer, which is everywhere most abundant, can provide. These creatures, produced from a shapeless jelly and invisible seed, by gradually developing and strictly preserving an apparently wandering figure, share the same reverence and paradisiacal joy with the most beautiful plants, which only the legions of nature, preserved by the eternal Divinity, can beget.

provided with projections, rough, shaggy, shiningly smooth, or covered with a very delicate skin; and their color is sometimes dull and faded, sometimes extremely fresh and lively. Furthermore, it deserves to be noted that the work on the knowledge of fungi is by no means at an end, and that every investigator still has much before him, even if the greatest men have already tried their luck with it. Microscopic observations also find excellent entertainment here and are often quite indispensable. Much is still left for physiology, as well as for anatomical investigation, of which a proof can be found in the treatise by Johann Jacob Paul Moldenhawer, which appeared as a controversial paper on the vessels of plants in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1779. Moreover, we find the earth covered with these creatures on the foggy days of winter, when all plants, whose blossoms and leaves beautified the days of summer, already lie buried under the general sleep of nature and are dead or robbed of their beauty. Then, I say, we find the earth covered with these creatures, and these fungi also accompany the most beautiful times of the year, the coming and departing of blooming nature. And certainly, they then spread, as I myself have experienced, more pleasure to their admirers than summer with all its abundance can do. These children of nature, which arise from an unformed jelly and an invisible seed, are able, as they gradually develop and precisely observe their seemingly negligent formation, to provide a feeling heart with the same deep respect and paradisiacal pleasure as the most beautiful plant, which only the contemplation of the hosts of nature and their constant preservation by an eternal power can produce.