attends the York School of Art and Downing College
collecting journies to the West Indies and South America
1893 - 1915 becomes the mycologist at the Kew botanical gardens, replacing Cooke
Massee was a protégé of Cooke, who did a lot of work introducing Massee to mushrooms, the countryside, and other mycologists. Massee took over as cryptogamicbotanist at Kew after Cooke was forced out, and he bought (along with a business partner) Cooke's journal Grevillea in 1892, becoming its new editor; it only survived for another two years. He was one of the founders of the British Mycological Society, and its first president.
While an institutionally important figure with a tremendous knowledge of fungi, Massee was also lazy and careless, both in his own work and in researching the work of others. This caused him to make what English calls "extraordinary mistakes" in his published writings.
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