S; 2
CRYPTOGAMIA Algce.
G en. Char. Seeds in black, linear, sessile, simple or
branched, bordered clefts, in an uninterrupted crust.
S p e c . C h a r . Crust very thin, membranous, smooth,
white. Clefts slightly prominent, coal black, smooth,
crowded, wavy, simple or divided.
Syn. Opegrapha denigrata. Ach. Meth. 27.
O . atra. Per soon in Ust.Ann.fasc. 7 .3 0 .1. 1 .ƒ. 2 , C, c.
Lichen denigratus. Ach. Prod. 24.
W E have been backward in adopting most of the genera into
which the learned Professor Acharius has divided the great
family of Lichen, because we knew his studies to be progressive,
and that he had not yet accomplished all his designs.
The genus of Opegrapha however, named and characterized
by Humboldt and Persoon, and consisting of numerous
species, confounded by Linnæus under his Lichen scriptus, is
so clearly distinct that we cannot hesitate to admit it. Adan-
son indeed had previously called it Grafts, in the same work
in which he made a strange genus of Dillenius’s Sphagnum 3,
4, io—13, and called it Green, in defiance of all Greek and
Latin nomenclature : but such whimsical writers, whether they
happen to be occasionally right or wrong, neither deserve nor
receive any attention, because their perverse changes and contrarieties,
if listened to, would give more trouble than any of
their discoveries could compensate; and it is always to be
suspected that truth is not their primary object ; which is
notorious with regard to Adanson.
The present species grows on the smoothest bark of trees.
Its very thin, greenish-white, smooth crust forms roundish
patches, inseparable from the bark. The lines or clefts of
fructification are peculiarly black, crowded, somewhat parallel,
undulating, simple or branched, a little prominent, and but
slightly sunk into the crust, which does not rise into a border
at their sides.
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