Elias Magnus Fries

Elias Magnus Fries grew up in Småland in Sweden, in a landscape where the seasonal appearance of fruiting bodies could be watched year after year. He studied and lectured at the universities of Lund and Uppsala. The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University holds botanical collections connected with him, through which a name can be set against a physical specimen, and a description against the real variability of a fungus.

Fries's greatest undertaking was the multi-volume Systema Mycologicum, published from 1821. He ordered fungi according to sets of characters of the fruiting body: the structure of the hymenophore, shape, veils, colour and other properties that could be checked in the field or in a herbarium. The system did not fully reconstruct the evolutionary relationships that could not then be measured, but it gave researchers a shared language and a hierarchy for an enormous number of descriptions.

In nomenclature, Fries's works acquired a particular historical significance. Many names were treated by later codes as sanctioned, which helped to stabilise their use. That does not mean that every classification of Fries remains current. Microscopic, chemical and molecular analyses have repeatedly divided his broad genera, or united species that superficially looked different. His books nonetheless remain the point one has to return to when establishing the meaning of an old name.

Fries's legacy shows the difference between description and explanation. The morphology of a fruiting body is still indispensable for recognising fungi, but a similar shape can evolve in distant lineages. Today's taxonomy combines characters, reference material and DNA. Fries supplied one of the most important historical scaffolds for that work: a catalogue of observations precise enough to be tested and corrected two centuries later.

The collection has a value independent of the authority of a name, too. Specimens can be examined again, imaged and — if the condition of the material allows — studied molecularly. An original diagnosis ceases to be a closed monument and becomes a hypothesis checked against preserved material and new data.

Collection and Code separate a “system” from present truth

Uppsala’s Museum of Evolution preserves large parts of Fries’s fungal collections, together with books and plates. The institution stresses that the material is often type material or the oldest surviving material associated with a published name, which is why researchers still travel to study it. The Madrid Code supplies a second layer of continuity: names of other fungi—outside the groups assigned to Persoon and excluding slime moulds—adopted in the three volumes of Systema mycologicum (1821–32), its 1832 index and the two volumes of Elenchus fungorum are sanctioned. This does not sanction the whole morphology-based classification or certify Fries’s ideas of relationship. It protects the nomenclatural status of particular names, while specimens and illustrations make it possible to test what he actually meant by them. The combination of a rule and traceable material, rather than reverence for an old system, keeps Fries’s work operational.