THEIR STUDY IN BRITAIN. 7
at Kew, showing that the friends had shared their treasures.
Berkeley often visited Broome in his home near Bath, in a district
where the moist wooded valleys formed a prolific hunting-
ground for all kinds of fungi. Broome was a cultivated man
of wide interests and somewhat austere habits. He had a
retiring disposition, but proved a charming companion to his
intimate friends.
The next advance in our knowledge of Mycetozoa in Britain
is due to one who has only lately been taken from us. Dr. M.
C. Cooke. To many of us, Dr. Cooke was for a number of
years a familiar figure on the occasion of our Club's annual
Fungus Forays, when he gave his valuable services as referee,
and when, in the evenings, he would sum up the results of the
day's work, or give some pithy address on the wider aspects
of fungus life. We well remember his short lean figure, his quiet
energy, and the quaint humour with which he would enliven
the most technical discourse. His Handbook of British Fungi,
published in two volumes in 1871, was, as he tells us,
a revision of Berkeley's work. By adding descriptions of
new species published since 1836, as well as of those
continental species recently found in Britain, by giving
concise keys to many genera and supplying excellent woodcuts
illustrating every genus, Cooke produced an extremely
valuable and convenient book of reference. As regards
Mycetozoa, many species were added to those recorded in English
Flora, but no critical attention was paid to the group. Cooke
himself was well aware that the, subject deserved better treat-
ment. When, in 1875, Dr. Joseph Rostafinski published under
the supervision of his great master, De Bary, his magnificent
Monograph of Mycetozoa (written, alas ! in the Polish language),
Cooke had the energy to translate into English all the keys of
genera and species and the descriptions of such species as were
then known to be British. The value of this book was much
enhanced by the plates, which consist of reproductions of nearly
all Rostafinski's beautiful illustrations. In this modest-
looking volume, entitled The Myxomycetes of Great Britain,
English readers had for the first time a work dealing thoroughly
with the microscopic structure of Mycetozoa, on the characters
of which the true affinities of the species are found to depend.
It is curious that, with all his respect for the work of De Bary