THE study of Fungi in this country has gradually attained an importance which is sufficiently indicated by the appearance of the present much-needed work, comprising as it does the characters of no less than 369 genera and above 2,800 species. The works of Bolton and Sower by at the latter end of the last and the commencement of the present century had laid a solid foundation for a study which, however, attracted but comparatively few students. There was, however, no genera treatise on fungi, in our own language, to which refereneel could be made, till 1821, when Gray's “Natural Arrangement of British Plants”gave the English botanist an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the labours of Nees von Esenbeck and other continental botanists, a very important share of the labour having been undertaken by Dr. J. E. Gray. A storm of opposition was raised against it because of its recommendation of a natural system, a recommendation which was then thought sufficient to justify an exclusion from well-deserved honours; a virulent attack was made in the British Critic, and the work fell in consequence, notwithstanding its merits, almost dead from the press. Some ten or fifteen years later, Sir W.J. Hooker undertook the completion of the English Flora, which had not gone beyond the higher Cryptogams, his own “Scottish Flora,” Greville's “Flora Edinensis,”and the “Scottish Cryptogamic Flora” having already done much for fungi, when the preparation of the part of the work relating to those plants was entrusted to the Rev. M. J. Berkeley, who had made an especial study, especially of the higher Fungi, and had already discovered the true structure of the hymenium, which had, however, long before been indicated under Agaricus comatus in the “Flora Danica.” From the time of the publication of his volume, continual accessions were made, especially by Mr. C.E. Broome and Mr. G.H.K. Thwaites, who has since done so much for this interesting tribe as well as in the higher orders of plants in Ceylon, and which have been incorporated in a series of memoirs in the “Magazine and Annals of Natural History,” either singly by Mr. Berkeley or jointly with Mr. Broome; nor must we omit Mr. Currey's very important contribution to the knowledge of our British Sphæriæ, of which it is scarcely possible to overrate the value as regards the characters of the fructification. It was then proposed by Messrs. Reeve to publish Outlines of British Fungology, confining, however, the description to those species which did not require much microscopic aid but adding a list of all the known species so far as the existing state of information went. Mr. Broome and Mr. Currey, with several others, have persistently carried on the study of these plants, the knowledge of which is every day advancing, and as Mr. Berkeley's work was confessedly imperfect, we have great reason to be thankful to Mr. Cooke for undertaking the very laborious, and, we fear, scarcely remunerative labours which he has so successfully accomplished. No student of Fungi can be without the two volumes, and they certainly ought to have a place in every botanical library of the slightest pretension. The work has throughout been conducted in the most conscientious way, and infinite pains have been taken to verify the obscurer species, in which the author has had the ready assistance of those botanists in this country who have paid most attention to these difficult plants.