History of the Fungi of the Kingdom of Naples

where it was necessary and as much as I was able, appropriate changes and useful observations. Furthermore, I have drawn the necessary figures again with my own hand, so that they might be more faithfully rendered according to nature. Finally, I have changed many specific names that sounded the same and in vain in the works of others, in order to avoid a chaos of synonyms.

All these things, most excellent colleagues, I do not wish to be understood as being done to seize greater glory for myself, but on the contrary, so that I might more easily obtain forgiveness if anything should be found to have crept into the writings or be wanting. For it is right to expect this of such things, since they appear posthumously and are therefore deserving of every excuse: "Much is to be forgiven in a posthumous work." It must also be mentioned here that it should be a wonder to no one if these writings now seem to present less novelty than they once seemed to possess when they were first offered to you. Indeed, the very slow edition or dispersion of them was the cause for my transposing some species of fungi already described and depicted by my father as if they had been designated by others in a later age. For when I was attending more to the positive progress of science than to the glory of discovery, I neglected to claim this very discovery for its author; and I willingly chose later specific phrases that presented the characters of natural objects more clearly and intensely to the minds of all.

With these things so arranged, I had already decided to commit these writings to print at my own expense when, after greater concern was aroused in our Academy that the studies of the members be published, the knight Vincentius Flauti, in his perpetual [zeal]...