A monograph on the genus Galerina Earle / by Alexander H. Smith and Rolf Singer.

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The Genus Galerina Earle

next plan was to check these characters in the field, on fresh material. At
this time it was abundantly clear to me why the Galerinae could not be identified satisfactorily with the existing literature-there were about five. times
as many species in North America alone as had been previously recognized
for the genus.
At this stage of the work, Dr. Rolf Singer returned from Tucuman,
Argentina, and on the occasion of a visit to my laboratory commented on
the amount of material he had uncovered in Calerina, and that he was thinking of doing a monograph of the genus for South America. I showed him my
work and we decided to publish a monograph jointly, since it was clear that
we had each independently discovered certain distinct groups and had
arrived at similar conclusions in regard to speciation and evolution within
the genus. We laid plans for spending a field season together in order to
check our observations again on fresh material and the summer of 1953
we were together at the University of Michigan Biological Sta~ion on
Douglas Lake, in Cheboygan County, Michigan. During the course of this
season we were able to establish that the spore characters, upon which we
placed great emphasis, could be ascertained easily and accurately from
both fresh and dried specimens under the proper optical system. The
season was warm and fairly dry, which was excellent for Galerina, and much
new information was obtained, in addition to answers to the special problems being studied.
With the results of the 1953 season behind us we felt confident of the
characters we were using and reassured in regard to our species concepts.
We decided to publish even though we now realized, more than ever before,
that we could not hope to write anything more than a preliminary world
monograph.
The work has been full of surprises for both of us, and we wish it clearly
understood that we claim only to have placed the genus in its proper perspective in regard to other genera of the gill fungi and to have demonstrated
the occurrence of sufficient lines of evolution in the group to make it easier'
to correlate future discoveries. Since the species are largely moss-inhabiting,
it would be presumptuous on our part to claim any degree of completeness
for our treatment without first collecting intensively in Canada for many
years. There are, of course, many other areas of the world where the moss
flora is luxuriant and in which Galerinae must be abundant but have never
been collected. We hope that the study of this genus in such areas will be
facilitated by our work.