Critical Review of the Mycological System

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THE METHOD OF THE WORK.

Twenty years have passed again since the drafting of the first volume of the Systema Mycologicum Mycological System, written in 1819, the only universal work on this discipline to date. From that time, year after year, with divine favor, I have most diligently observed the more perfect fungi that it contains, I have traveled through new and distant regions (of which the Upsalian region provided a large harvest of species not previously discovered), and I have carefully examined collections liberally sent from all parts of the earth. Furthermore, many very important works have been added, for example, the continuation of the Flora Danica, and new works published by those distinguished men: Berkeley, Desmazieres, Greville, Klotzsch, Krombholtz, Lasch, Lenz, Letellier, Montagne, Persoon, Rostkovius, Secretan, Schweinitz, Vittadini, Weinmann, and others not sufficiently known to me. In this way, the abundance of material has become three or four times greater; not to mention countless so-called novelties, which seemed to me to be consigned to those known from antiquity, but which, as long as they are not exposed in a universal work, increase the indigestible mass of science. In this way, the first volume of the Systema Mycologicum, although complete for its time, has become so incomplete or, if I may say so, antiquated in its abundance and power of things, that one can hardly use it without a Supplement that is itself three times larger.