History of the Fungi of the Kingdom of Naples

on both sides, and left them almost entirely forgotten. Yet, one thing stood against this injury: filial affection. While it does not allow me to overlook the memory of my parents in other matters, and teaches me through various reasons to pass that memory on to others to be cultivated, it has kept me from directly presenting my father’s praises, which are often vain or deceptive; but it persuaded me better to capture for him the deserved esteem and regard of men from his own writings and his assiduous scientific labors.

Therefore, driven by this sacred duty—both by natural affection and by our shared studies, in which he strove to educate me with every effort—I decided that neither labor nor expense should be spared to recover his scattered specimens and to attach them to my own later work, which I had already decided to commit to print, having also been approved in the acts of the Academy.

However, only a few fragments of the original manuscript remained for me, which were only of help in repeating the explorations of the locations according to the nature of the times, where he had first collected the abundance of fungi. In this matter, not only did easy and opportune investigation smile upon me, but a fruit richer than my wishes came to me. For beyond the greater part of the vegetation I had intended, I also collected a number of species and varieties, and a wealth of other related cryptophytes a botanical term for plants without flowers, such as mosses, ferns, and fungi. Wherefore I thought to study not only the filling of the gaps found in the autograph descriptions, but also the discussion of each individual species with a new examination. This I did after that recent light by which this mycological science has been increased due to the assiduous care of modern scholars; and I added—