William Alphonso Murrill

William Alphonso Murrill (1869 - 1957)

Image of William Alphonso Murrill from Curtis Gates Lloyd (1898 - 1925) Mycological Notes

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Biography
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Selected publications
Species
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Biography

Murrill had one of the most eventful lives in mycology. The is partly because he sort of had two lives: the first one in the North, the second in the South. The account presented here of his life in the South is based on research by James W. Kimbrough of the University of Florida; my account of his Northern years comes from many sources.

The events of his first life are well covered in the NYBG page below. He went through a fairly conventional sequence of schooling and ascending positions at the New York Botanical Garden. From 1909 to 1924 he was the assistant director, effectively second-in-command of the entire garden. But all was not so simple.

Murrill had a complex personality that won him many dedicated friends, but got him into trouble with reality. I am not going to try to sum up his personality; I believe that "the elements were so mixed in him," and so rich, that it would impoverish our understanding of the man to simply list character traits. The terms "idealistic" and "naïve" are often applied to him, but the real situation was just not that simple.

Photo of Boletus inedulis by John Denk

Murrill had, for example, a very distinctive way of speaking. It was very courtly, involving many flowery compliments to ladies, and is usually associated with his upbringing in Virginia. It is often said to be the speech of a "Southern gentleman", or at least Murrill's conception of the way a Southern gentleman would (should?) speak.

I have only one specific example of this aspect of Murrill's speech: a comeback he made to Mrs. Singer in defence of it. When Rolf Singer sought Murrill out in Florida, in preparation for The Boletineae of Florida, he brought his wife along. When Mrs. Singer pointed out that other botanists didn't address her in this way, he responded "That's because I know what a man likes to see!"

A discussion of his first career may also help clarify my approach towards his personality. When I have heard mycologists discussing and speculating about Murrill, they do not seem tremendously puzzled or interested in the physical mysteries of his life: where he was during his disappearances, what he did or how he supported himself during those times. Understanding of such issues seems to come easy to botanists. Rather, the one thing that no one seems to be able to come to grips with is how such a nice person could have put up with working so closely (second-in-command) with Nathaniel Lord Britton for so many years at the New York Botanical Gardens.

Photo of Boletus inedulis by John Denk

There are actually several reasons why the two men might have gotten along. For one thing, Murrill's manner of speech would have been tremendously helpful in managing a board (or other donors), and managing his contributors was clearly one of Britton's highest priorities. Another circumstance that would have made each valuable to the other is Britton's American Code of Botanical Nomenclature.

Britton had just declared America's independence from European (okay, International) botanical nomenclature by starting his own system. Not that the rest of America followed along with him (far from it). But this meant that he now had to populate his system (after all, a taxonomical system with no names isn't very useful) with different names from the standard one (since, after all, a taxonomical system with the same names as its competitor might as well not exist). Murrill, for his part, was a born namer. He has had the reputation (I'm exaggerating only slightly here) of writing up anything that he couldn't identify off the top of his head as a new species, usually without checking the books to see whether the name was already in use or not, or (more importantly) whether someone else had already described and named the mushroom in question. I'll go into this in more depth towards the end of the article, but for now I'll just point out that when he was working at the garden, it really didn't matter if his mushroom had already been described: under the American Code, he was going to have to think of a new name for it anyway. True, he did the same thing later in life, when the American Code was long dead, so it's not clear whether he developed a bad habit at the garden or whether he just didn't care at any point. Like I said, I'll talk about this more towards the end of the article.

Besides the above, Murrill was a tireless worker (when he was there at all): he contributed tons of articles to Mycologia; he commissioned beautiful illustrations for Mycologia; he performed simple experiments so that the illustrators of Mycologia could illustrate the results; he ran the education department; he charmed the trustees. Britton, in turn, seems to have let him do whatever he wanted with the journal and the education department, which is very important to people who have something that they want to do.

In other words, both men had ample reason to value their professional association. Murrill, for his part, may well have been (a) too spacey to notice when Britton was being a bastard, and (b) to genteel to pay it any mind when he did notice. And as Murrill played a large, positive role in Britton's two dearest endeavors, it's quite possible that Britton was nicer to him than he was to the other botanists at the garden. Or if not exactly nice, he at least clearly knew how to compliment people he wished to cultivate, and Murrill clearly appreciated the language of such compliments.

A combination of circumstances led to Murrill's departure from the New York Botanical Gardens. First of all, Murrill took several collecting "tour"s of Europe during his tenure at the gardens. He doesn't seem to have followed any fixed itinerary, or let the people back home know where he was. (He also collected in South America, but those trips don't seem to have been so informal.) Packages of specimens, occasional letters, would arrive at the New York Botanical Gardens, and eventually the man himself would return. In early 1924, Murrill departed for Europe and just disappeared. For eight months, no one knew where he was, what he was doing, or whether he was still alive. During this time, the garden filled his position, and his wife divorced him for abandonment. What happened is that Murrill had a chronic kidney condition that he hadn't told anyone about. How he had kept this secret for all his years at the garden is a mystery to me. I guess that if you just take off at irregular intervals anyway, it doesn't always occur to people that some of those times are spent lying in a hospital. Anyway, on this particular European trip, Murrill had a particularly severe attack of his kidney trouble, and spent most of those months in a small hospital in a rural French village. (I imagine that the level of care typical of provincial hospitals at the time may have contributed to the length of his stay.)

In any case, it doesn't seem to have occurred to him to let anyone know where he was for all that time. When he returned to New York, he was shocked and hurt to discover that he was no longer married and no longer employed. I believe that the garden tried to hire him back, in a less responsible post, but he refused angrily. I don't think he told them about his kidney problem, by the way, then or ever. He left New York and disappeared again, this time deliberately. His whereabouts were generally unknown for several years.

Image of Cerrena unicolor from A. M. Hussey (1847 - 1855) Illustrations of British mycology

He was re-discovered in the late 20s by George Weber, a plant pathologist at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Murrill seems to have met him and Erdman West, curator of the herbarium, passing through on the way to one of his collecting trips in South America. In the words of Jim Kimbrough,

"Weber told me that he and his wife Kate were browsing through a tourist court on the outskirts of Gainesville, came upon a crowd listening to a classical pianist at a pavilion, nudged their way through, and were surprised to find Murrill doing the honors. Murrill was heavily bearded, stooped from when they last saw him, and looked rather unkempt. The Webers took him in and, along with Erdman West, saw that he was fed."

According to his autobiography, Murrill had spent the years of his disappearance wintering in Florida and spending the rest of the year in Virginia (whether with relatives or in a little house he built is not clear to me). He seems to have intended to head North in the spring this year also, but his magical kidney acted up again and his Florida friends checked him into the college infirmary, where he endeared himself to the entire staff by chatting them up about their local natural history. When he was released several weeks later, the summer rains had started, and Florida's main fruiting of mushrooms was in full flush. Murrill had never seen these before, as he had always headed North for the summer. He was fascinated by the variety of species, many of them new to him, and began collecting them and writing them up.

When Murrill showed up at the university with his new specimens, Weber and West were kind of in a bind: they couldn't very well give him a lab or an office, since he wasn't faculty, and space was limited. They ended up moving a desk into a landing on a staircase, and equipping it with a microscope, reagents, and anything else that Murrill needed. This landing became Murrill's office for the next thirty years.

"According to West and Weber, Murrill would work into the wee hours of the morning identifying specimens; tiring, he would go across the street to the Student Union where he would find a comfortable couch in the lobby on which to sleep. Students would rouse him around 9:00 AM [when they came in to eat there], buy him breakfast and delight in talking with him." (Kimbrough)

This was his routine for several years. During this time, other mycologists gradually began to find out where he was, on an individual basis, and started visiting him. One of them took a stack of Murrill's articles back with him and started getting them published, much to the consternation of people who didn't know where he was. Eventually, he made his whereabouts known to the higher-ups at the New York Botanical Gardens, and this turned out to be a very good thing, because his books had sold well and the Garden had over $600 waiting for him in escrow. Weber and West had a discretionary budget with which to hire collectors of specimens, and with this money they were paying Murrill $50 a month. This was probably more than enough for someone who slept on the sofa in the student union, but not if he wanted to do much else. With the new NYBG money, he bought construction materials and built himself a house. Soon finding it too small, he built another and rented the first one out. He stopped after the third house, renting the first two. With three sources of income (royalties, rent, and his collector's salary), he was able to live comfortably from then on. Periodically he would check back into the infirmary when his kidney acted up, but otherwise he lived like this, happily occupied, until the end of his life. And so should we all.

Image of Melanoleuca alboflavida from A. M. Hussey (1847 - 1855) Illustrations of British mycology

I promised earlier to say something about his reputation for promiscuous naming, and here it is. Basically, I think it's a mixed bag. Certainly Britton wanted new names at the NYBG, whether they should have been new or not. And I don't imagine that he had a tremendous research library in his stairwell office in Florida. So there are legitimate, material reasons that he often didn't bother to research a mushroom to see if someone else had named it already. But, at the same time, his personal inclination seems to have been in that direction anyway. Clearly, he was someone who was very excited to be immersed in his work, and he didn't even like to surface for air very much, let alone to trudge to the library and try and make sense of old descriptions. And here see also Ray Fatto's comments about him under the discussion of the genus Russula. But this facet of his personality has also gotten confused with his ideology as a splitter: he was clearly willing to erect new species on the slightest provocation - - naming (or perhaps "discovering") new species seems to have been one of the main things that excited him about his work. Sometimes he was rather silly in these, but sometimes he was right, too, and in ways that no one else was for quite a long time.

Some concrete examples may help. A convenient list of these may be found in Lee Oras Overholts & J. L. Lowe's (1953) Polyporaceae of the United States, Alaska, and Canada: at the end of each section, Lowe lists "omitted species". Some of these seem to have been simply overlooked until the proofing process was well along (when they would have been very expensive to include); but most of them are species that contemporaries had published and Lowe wanted to mention in the book but didn't have time to write up. Most of these species (25 out of 29 of the omitted species of Polyporus, and 4 out of 6 of the omitted species of Fomes) are authored by Murrill. What is interesting is that in these lists Lowe gives his reasons for excluding (when he does so) Murrill's species, and he usually also gives Murrill a chance to answer back.

The reasons for Murrill's bad reputation are painfully clear when Lowe makes entries like:

Coriolus tenuispinifer.
The type material of this species is a sterile, unidentified species of Coriolus parasitized by an imperfect fungus which has formed long brown spines.

At other times there seems to be a simple difference of opinion:

Tyromyces Newellianus.
The type material of this species appears to be Polyporus fragilis. Dr Murrill disagrees: "Polyporus fragilis has a whitish tomentose surface; spores averaging 5 x 2 µm; and always grows on coniferous wood. T. Newellianus is ochraceous, not tomentose, with spores 3-4 x 1 µm, and always occurs on hardwood."

In any case, Lowe usually lets Murrill have his say, so in these lists you can see him argue several cases in one place. You can have fun checking these out yourself. Overholts and Lowe seem to have been quite conscientious, not only allowing Murrill his two cents in their book, but including species they felt were valid even when it conflicted with their ideology: his Ganoderma tsugae, for example, even though they complain elsewhere about him erecting too many new species solely on the basis of a different host for the fungus. This is now a standard practice, of course: we now recognize many species of Phellinus that (outside of mating and DNA studies) are almost indistinguishable except by knowing their host.

Photo of Pycnoporus cinnabarinus by John Denk

In other cases, both parties were, in a way, correct: Overholts and Lowe synonymize Murrill's Grifola sumstinei with "Polyporus giganteus" (nowadays, both species are placed in Meripilus). In as far as their work went, Overholts and Lowe were correct: Murrill's species is indeed indistinguishable from other american collections of Meripilus giganteus. However, Meripilus giganteus is a European species, and recent researchers have decided that it is distinct from our American Meripilus, which is now called by Murrill's (transferred) name: Meripilus sumstinei. As in all science, sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong; that's just the way it is. Whether Murrill really knew what he was doing, in this case, depends on whether he thought he was making a distinction from American material or European descriptions. I don't know...

Murrill's species are not the end of the story, however. There are also his genera. And here the picture is much more positive. While the fine distinctions that he drew may have resulted in many invalid species, they also sensitized him to criteria for grouping those species in genera that have proved very useful to later mycologists. His constructive use, also, of the then-recent-and-somewhat-controversial genera of Karsten and Quélet helped legitimize their taxa in the face of opposition from vocal nomenclaturally conservative botanists (like Overholts, Lowe, and Lloyd). The positive effects of his use and creation of these genera is especially evident in the modern genera we use in the Polyporaceae and Boletaceae.

He himself said

"[a] novel procedure criticised by older men was the use of small genera which contained species closely related rather than the large familiar generic groups with many cumbersome subdivisions. Since genera are not by any means sacred concepts, younger students have been quick to accept these simpler genera as more convenient as well as more logical."
Autobiography, p. 110-111

Other Web Sources

Murrill papers at NYBG

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Selected Publications

William Alphonso Murrill (1902) "The Polyporaceae of North America: I. The genus Ganoderma" in Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 29:10 pp. 599 - 608

William Alphonso Murrill (1903) "The Polyporaceae of North America: II. The genus Pyropolyporus" in Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 30:2 pp. 109 - 120

William Alphonso Murrill (1903) "The Polyporaceae of North America: III. The genus Fomes" in Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 30:4 pp. 225 - 232

William Alphonso Murrill (1903) "The Polyporaceae of North America: IV. The genus Elfvingia" in Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 30:5 pp. 296 - 301

This is the genus that Karsten created to accommodate the Ganodermas that aren't shiny, like G. applanatum.

Keys and descriptions of genera and species of Chanterelles, Lactarius, and part of the white-spored Agaricaceae

Covers Northeastern U.S. and Canada

William Alphonso Murrill, Calvin Henry Kauffman & Lee Oras Overholts (1914 - 1932) "Agaricaceae: Part 2" in North American Flora 10 pp. 1 - 348

Remaining white-spored Agaricaceae, plus pink and brown-spored genera, with Inocybe and Cortinarius by Kauffman and Pholiota and Hypodendron by Overholts.
I can't find Hypodendron in The Dictionary of the Fungi, but it does say that Singer synonymized Hypodendrum with Pholiota, so these two taxa are probably the same thing, since Earle was Murrill's predecessor at the NY Botanical Gardens.
And of course it might just be a typo in The Dictionary...

William Alphonso Murrill (1915) "The genus Clitocybe in North America" in Mycologia 7:5 pp. 256 - 283

Mostly a list of species with synonyms and distribution.

William Alphonso Murrill (1915) "The validity of Clitocybe megalospora" in Mycologia 7 pp. 157 - 158

William Alphonso Murrill (1915) Southern Polypores

William Alphonso Murrill (1915) "The genus Lepista" in Mycologia 7:2 pp. 105 - 107

William Alphonso Murrill (1915) Tropical Polypores

William Alphonso Murrill (1915) Western Polypores

Covers Alaska, British Columbia and the Pacific Coast

William Alphonso Murrill (1916) "Gymnopus" in North American Flora 9:5 pp. 352 - 376

William Alphonso Murrill (1918) "The Agaricaceae of Tropical North America: 8. Purple-brown to black-spored genera (cont.)" in Mycologia 10:2 pp. 62 - 85

William Alphonso Murrill (1918) Billy the Boy Naturalist

This is Murrill's first autobiographical work.

William Alphonso Murrill (1918) "The Agaricaceae of Tropical North America: 7. Purple-brown to black-spored genera" in Mycologia 10:1 pp. 15 - 33

William Alphonso Murrill (1919) The Naturalist in a Boarding School

William Alphonso Murrill (1919) The Natural History of Staunton Virginia

William Alphonso Murrill (1920) "Another new truffle" in Mycologia 12:3 pp. 157 - 158

A supplement to Gilkey's supplement to her 1916 monograph. When you're editor of the journal, you can respond to things very quickly!

William Alphonso Murrill (1920) "Light-colored resupinate Polypores: 1." in Mycologia 12:2 pp. 77 - 92

William Alphonso Murrill (1920) "Light-colored resupinate Polypores: 2." in Mycologia 12:6 pp. 299 - 308

William Alphonso Murrill (1920) "Corrections and additions to the Polypores of temperate North America" in Mycologia 12:1 pp. 6 - 24

William Alphonso Murrill (1921) "Light-colored resupinate Polypores: 4." in Mycologia 13:3 pp. 171 - 178

William Alphonso Murrill (1921) "Light-colored resupinate Polypores: 3." in Mycologia 13:2 pp. 83 - 100

William Alphonso Murrill (1922) "Dark-spored Agarics: 4. Deconica, Atylospora and Psathyrella" in Mycologia 14:5 pp. 258 - 278

Deconica (W. G. Smith) Karsten has been synonymized with Psilocybe by Singer, and Atylospora is really Astylospora Fayod, which was synonymized with Psathyrella by Singer

William Alphonso Murrill (1922) "Dark-spored Agarics: 1. Drosophila, Hypholoma and Pilosace" in Mycologia 14:2 pp. 61 - 76

Yes, Virginia, there is a genus of mushroom with the same name as a fruit fly. I'm not sure how the rules of Botanical Nomenclature handle that: I know we're not allowed to use names that have been assigned to plant taxa, but I'm not sure about animals.
In any case, Drosophila Quélet is a nomen dubem, which Singer has declared equivalent to Psathyrella. And Pilosace is incertae sedis, also according to Singer. I certainly doubt it's been used by many people after Murrill

Species

Agaricus pocillator Murrill
Amanita virginiana (Murrill) Murrill
Amanita wellsii (Murrill) Saccardo
Boletus inedulis (Murrill) Murrill
Cerrena unicolor (Bulliard: Fries) Murrill
Chroogomphus jamaicensis (Murrill) O. K. Miller
Coltricia cinnamomea (Persoon) Murrill
Coltricia perennis (Fries) Murrill
Coriolus tenuispinifer Murrill
Ganoderma curtisii (Berkeley) Murrill
Ganoderma tsugae Murrill
Globifomes graveolens (Schweinitz: Fries) Murrill
Grifola sumstinei Murrill
Gymnopilus penetrans (Fries: Fries) Murrill
Gymnopus dryophilus (Bulliard: Fries) Murrill
Laetiporus sulphureus (Bulliard: Fries) Murrill
Melanoleuca alboflavida (Peck) Murrill
Melanoleuca melaleuca (Persoon: Fries) Murrill
Meripilus sumstinei (Murrill) M. J. Larsen in F. F. Lombard
Omphalina chrysophylla (Fries) Murrill
Phylloporus rhodoxanthus var. acericola (Murrill) Singer
Porodisculus pendulus (Schweinitz) Murrill
Poronidulus conchifer (Schweinitz) Murrill
Pycnoporus sanguineus (Linnaeus: Fries) Murrill
Russula mutabilis Murrill
Russula subgraminicolor Murrill
Stropharia rugosoannulata (Farlow) Murrill
Tectella patellaris (Fries) Murrill
Tylopilus indecisus (Peck) Murrill
Tyromyces caesius (Fries) Murrill
Tyromyces newellianus Murrill

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Genera

Abortiporus Murrill
Boletellus Murrill
Globifomes Murrill
Laetiporus Murrill
Marasmiellus Murrill
Porodisculus Murrill
Poronidulus Murrill
Pulveroboletus Murrill
Rigidoporus Murrill
Trichaptum Murrill

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