A Figure in the Fog: George Edward Massee

摘要

George Edward Massee (Figure 1) was a Yorkshire mycologist. Born in Scampston, he would go on to succeed Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (1825-1914) at the Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG), Kew, to become the British authority on mycology in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries. In this position he wrote numerous texts on multiple facets of mycology with many of these becoming the standard texts in the discipline. Indeed, some were still recommended as late as 1975 (Holden, 1975). Outside of his position at Kew, he served as the first President of the British Mycological Society and later was the second Chairman of the Yorkshire Mycological Committee. His contributions to Yorkshire mycology are particularly notable, given his co-authorship with Charles Crossland (1844-1916) of The Fungus Flora of Yorkshire (Massee & Crossland, 1905), which was the first regional mycota produced and quickly became a reference text for other mycologists seeking to document the fungi of their regions.