From the description I think you have placed your plants in the right family. And evidently they come in the genera named, but at present there is in the authorities at my command so much confusion as to the genera, as given by the most eminent authorities, like Nageli, Kutzing, Braun Rabenht, Cohn, etc., that I think it would be quite unwise for me to settle here, or try to settle here, questions that baffle the naturalists who are entirely devoted to this specialty. We can safely leave this to them. Meantime let us look at the matter as physicians who desire the practical advantages of the discovery you have made. To illustrate this position let us take a familiar case. A boy going through the fields picks and eats an inedible mushroom. He is poisoned and dies. Now, what is the important part of history here from a physician's point of view? Is it not that the mushroom poisoned the child? Next comes the nomenclature. What kind of agaricus was it? Or was it one of the gasteromycetes, the coniomycetes, the hyphomycetes, the ascomycetes, or one of the physomycetes? Suppose that the fungologists are at swords' points with each other about the name of the particular fungus that killed the boy? Would the physicians feel justified to sit down and wait till the whole crowd of naturalists were satisfied, and the true name had been settled satisfactorily to all? I trow not; they would warn the family about eating any more; and if the case had not yet perished, they would let the nomenclature go and try all the means that history, research, and instructed common sense would suggest for the recovery. This leads me here to say that physicians trust too much to the simple dicta of men who may be very eminent in some department of natural history, and yet ignorant in the very department about which, being called upon, they have given an opinion. All everywhere have so much to learn that we should be very careful how we reject new truths, especially when they come from one of our number educated in our own medical schools, studied under our own masters. If the subject is one about which we know nothing, we had better say so when asked our opinion, and we should receive with respect what is respectfully offered by a man whom we know to be honest, a hard worker, eminent in his department by long and tedious labors. If he asks us to look over his evidence, do so in a kindly spirit, and not open the denunciations of bar room vocabularies upon the presenter, simply because we don't see his point. In other words, we should all be receptive, but careful in our assimilation, remembering that some of the great operations in surgery, for example, came from laymen in low life, as the operation for stone, and even the operation of spaying came from a swineherd.