Higher Fungi of the Hawaiian Islands

Abstract

The fungi enumerated in the present list consist of the Basidiomycetes collected by Professor F. L. Stevens in the Hawaiian Islands during the summer of 1921, and of the fungi in the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum Herbarium which were brought to the United States for study in connection with the Stevens collections. Most of the specimens from the Museum were collected by Professor C. N. Forbes. The 150 numbers which comprise this lot of specimens belong to 61 species; more than three-fifths of the specimens and nearly half of the species are Polypores; 11 per cent, or the 7 species, Lepiota xylophila, Crepidotus rhizomorphus, Fomes hawaiensis, Fomes fasciculatus, Poria fasciculata, Corticium granulare, and Epithele hydnoides, are regarded as indigenous. Lepiota xylophila Pk. and Fomes hawaiensis Forbes were described several years ago; the other 5 species named above are now described as new. Of the species fully determined, which occur in other countries besides the Hawaiian Islands, about 43 per cent are of cosmopolitan distribution, 13 per cent are confined to tropical regions of both America and Asia and East Indies, 2412 per cent occur in the Philippines and East Indies but not in America so far as known at present, and about 6 per cent of the species are regarded as indigenous members of the fungal flora of the north temperate region of North America. Hence the purely North American component in the higher fungal flora of the Hawaiian Islands is hardly a fourth as great as that of Asiatic, East Indian, and Philippine sources, so far as the present small number of species show. In accordance with the instructions received, a portion of each specimen, if sufficiently ample, has been retained in the Missouri Botanical Garden Herbarium and the remainder returned to