offered in its place.

Saccardo, in 1882, commenced his Sylloge, of which not less than twelve
volumes have been published. In Saccardo's system of classification the
six orders of the Hymenomycetes are not essentially different in their
arrangement from that of Fries, although Saccardo has raised all the
subgenera of Agaricus to the rank of genera, and then altered their
sequence so as to bring them into four sections, distinguished by the
color of their spores. Having raised the old subgenera of Fries to
generic rank, Saccardo found it necessary to limit the application of
the term Agaricus to the group of fungi to which it was originally
applied by Linnaeus, viz., the common field mushroom Agaricus campester,
and its allies, represented by Agaricus arvensis, Agaricus Rodmani,
etc., or, as Prof. Peck more definitely states it, "to those of the
gilled mushrooms which have brown spores, free gills, a stem bearing a
ring, gills generally pink-colored in the early stage, and brownish
black when fully matured." M. C. Cooke, the distinguished English
mycologist, prefers to retain the _genus Agaricus_ with its original
subgenera intact, succeeded by the other genera of Agaricini, as in the
Hymenomycetes Europei of Fries, giving as his reason the belief "that
for purposes of classification features should be taken which are
present and evident in the specimens themselves, and are not dependent
on any of their life-history which cannot be presented in the
herbarium."

In a work such as the present, which is designed to be popular in
character rather than purely technical, it is deemed advisable to select
as a basis for classification that system which is most accessible to
reference by the general reading public. Saccardo's Sylloge, while
exhaustive in character and of inestimable value to the mycologist, is
written in Latin, and is, moreover, a very expensive work--facts which
render it practically unavailable to the general public.

In the compilation of this series of pamphlets I have adopted the
classification of M. C. Cooke, which, as regards the Hymenomycetes, the
family containing most of the fleshy fungi, is, with exceptions noted,
in accord with that of Saccardo. M. C. Cooke's hand-book of fungi is of
convenient size and form for ready reference.

For the convenience, however, of those who may wish to familiarize
themselves with both systems, a synopsis of _Saccardo's Genera_ of
Hymenomycetes will be given later.