notions existed till late into our own century; about the middle of the 17th century Otto Von Münchausen thought that mushrooms were the habitations of Polypes, and Linnaeus assented to that view. What the nature-philosophers, as Nees von Esenbeck for instance, had to say on the nature of Fungi, need not be reproduced here. Still some useful observations had been accumulating for some time on this subject; as early as 1729 Micheli[1] had collected the spores of numerous Fungi, had sown them and obtained not only mycelia but also sporophores (fructifications), and Gleditsch confirmed these observations in 1753; Jacob Christian Schaeffer[2] about the year 1762 published very good figures of all the Fungi of Bavaria and the Palatinate, and collected the spores of many species. Yet Rudolphi and Link at the beginning of the present century ventured to deny the germination of the spores of Fungi; Persoon in 1818 thought that some Fungi grow from spores, others from spontaneous generation. A decided improvement appears after 1820 in the views of botanists with respect to Fungi, and to this Ehrenberg's elaborate essay, 'De Mycetogenesi,' published in that year in the Leopoldina, contributed greatly. In that work he collected together all that was then known on the nature and propagation of the Fungi, and communicated observations of his own on spores and their germination; he gave figures also of the course of the hyphae in large sporophores and in other parts, but his most important service was a description of the first observed case of
- ↑ Pier' Antonio Micheli, born at Florence in 1679, was Director of the Botanic Garden there, and died in 1737. Johann Jacob Dillen (Dillenius), born in Darmstadt in 1687, was Professor of Botany in Oxford, and died in 1747. These two botanists were the first who submitted the Mosses and the lower Cryptogams to scientific examination, and endeavoured to prove the presence of sexual organs in these plants.
- ↑ Jacob Christian Schaeffer, born in 1718, was Superintendent in Regensburg; he died in 1790.
