WHY THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE TYPE OF CRISTELLA PAT.?

Abstract

Although Cristella Patouillard is of taxonomic interest only to the mycologist, the typification of the name is of general nomenclatural interest. It bears on a longstanding controversy (cf. i.a. Bullock & Hunt 1966, Donk 1952, Furtado 1964, Moore 1966, Weresub 1967) on whether a generic name is typified by the designated species referred to by name (and its name applied in accordance with its type specimen) or by the material the author had before him when he described the new genus. Much has already been written about Cristella and its typification by e.g. Rogers (1944), Donk (1952, 1957 a & b) and Liberta (1966). But some of the information which seems to me pertinent to the decision made by Dr. Donk remains unpublished. It is presented here. In Les Hymenomycetes d'Europe, along with a number of previously known and other new genera under the 'Th616phor6s', Patouillard (1887 a: 151) published Cristella with a description which closed with the statement: 'Espices principales: Crist. cristata, etc.'. All are agreed that Crist. cristata must be taken as holotype, but a controversy centres on its identity. There would have been no controversy if Cristella had been published in isolation. It would have been taken as a monotypic genus proposed for a new species, and the description a generico-specific one. Cristella Pat. would be nomenclaturally typified by 'C. cristata Pat.' and a lectotype specimen would have been chosen from Patouillard's material to typify the name of the species. In Herb. Pat. at FH, three collections are pinned to sheet no. 1803 (Fig. 1) which is labelled Cristella cristata. Both lower specimens are dated too late (1910 at the left, 1897 at the right) to have been involved in the 1887 publication of the genus. Of the three, only the upper, which is undated, could possibly have been available to Patouillard (1887 a: 151) when he wrote: 'Champignons coriaces, sub6reux, fibreux, rameux, incrustants, difformes; basides ia quatre sterigmates; spores ovoYdes, subglobuleuses, blanches ou piles, muriquees. / Plantes terrestres. / Especes principales: Crist. cristata, etc.' Whether or not this collection (Fig. 2) actually was in Patouillard's hands when he described Cristella we cannot be sure. But certainly his description of the gross appearance could well apply to these clavarioid fruit-bodies, particularly his calling it a genus for 'terrestrial plants', a term he used most commonly though not exclusively for the erect fructifications of agarics, stipitate hydnums, thelephoras and clavarias. My microscopic examination of the material yielded no mature spores except for what are certainly extraneous ones in several specimens (e.g. Fig. 3, 4), among them (Fig. 6) some hyaline and describable as muricate, as well as light brown aculeate thelephoroid spores which could account for the 'pales' of the description. If we could accept Cristella cristata as a new Patouillard species typifying Cristella Pat., its name would be, as Cooke (1943: 288) has pointed out, 'based on a Clavaria-like fungus' (Clavaria-like at least in gross appearance) plus extraneous spores. And of this material in what would be taken as the type packet, at least