Critical Review of the Mycological System

LXI

The immense utility of fungi in common life, and especially as food, is never disseminated through precepts and books; it would therefore be desirable for Mycophagous Societies original: "Societates mycophagas" to be instituted at all Academies, under the auspices of those skilled in the subject, which would not only transmit their common experience (the individual's power and reliability in these matters is less) to the public, but also, with their members once dispersed into different provinces, introduce true knowledge and safe use among the common people through certain tradition and examples.

Of the remaining families of Fungi, the Pyrenomycetes have gained the greatest increase and exist fully reformed in my notes; whether their Epicrisis Critical Review will be published, I shall not say at present. Since no one among us has dared to publish the present work at his own expense without a salary for the author, I was forced into a study of brevity that is surely excessive (excluding the most serious observations, descriptions of new species, and an index of all species, as well as the synonyms of thousands of those determined after the edition of the S. M., the numbers of which I have only cited in Persoon’s Mycologia Europaea, among Secretan, etc., so that space might be spared, since I consider the entire costs of the edition as nearly wasted). For mycology should be referred to those cheap and, by most, neglected studies which procure neither money nor honors for their cultivators; but for that very reason, it will always have only faithful followers, though few, for whom it will be enough to admire the infinite variety and artifice of created things while resting in the bosom of nature.