Synopsis of Some Genera of the Large Pyrenomycetes / Camillea, Thamnomyces, Engleromyces

E-text prepared by Victoria Woosley, La Monte H. P. Yarroll, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)


The receipt of a nice specimen of Camillea Cyclops from Rev. Torrend, Brazil, has induced us to work over the similar species in our collection. On our last visit to Europe we photographed the various specimens we found in the museums, but did not study them as to structure. However, they make such characteristic photographs that we believe the known species can be determined from our figures.
In the old days all similar carbonous fungi were called Sphaeria. Montagne first received a section of Sphaeria with cylindrical form, from South America. The perithecia were long, cylindrical, and were arranged in a circle or were contiguous, near the summit of the stroma. He proposed to call it Bacillaria, as a section of Sphaeria, but the name being preoccupied, he, at the suggestion of Fries, afterwards named it in honor of himself, Camillea, Montagne's first name being Camille.
The original species were separated into a genus by Montagne in 1855, and five species listed, and it is a curious fact that these five species, as well as all others that have since been added, are of the American tropics. I have not worked over the Hypoxylons in the museums, but as far as the records go the genus Camillea does not occur in other tropical countries.
In 1845 Léveillé announced that he had discovered a plant resembling an Hypoxylon which had, however, the spores borne on filaments (acrogenous), and not in perithecia. He called it Phylacia globosa, and classified it in Sphaerioidaea. The specimen (Fig. 847) is still at Paris. Saccardo has omitted it, and states that Phylacia is probably a pycnidial condition of Hypoxylon turbinatum. Both were guesses, one statement surely, and both probably, wrong. The interior is filled with a powder that under the microscope appears to be made up of ligneous filaments mixed with a few spores. These filaments appear to me to be the disintegrated walls of the perithecia, and not the filaments that bear the spores. From analogy, at any rate, the spores of all these similar species are probably borne in asci which disappear early, and Phylacia seems to be the same genus as Camillea, the walls of the perlthecla disintegrating and forming a powdery mass. If this view is correct, Camillea can be divided into two sections.