Mordecai Cubitt Cooke     (1825 - 1914)




Image of Mordecai Cubitt Cooke from Curtis Gates Lloyd (1898 - 1925) Mycological Notes
Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

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Biography
Sources
Selected publications
Species
Genera

Biography

Anyone interested in Cooke should read the biography of him by Mary English. After a brief stint as a school-teacher, he made his living writing and illustrating books on a wide variety of topics in natural history. His life, even during the heighday of the Victorian fad for nature (which led to the extinction of several British birds and lichens through over-collecting), was a continual struggle for subsistence, which he supplemented by issuing 1300 species of exsiccati. Even when his books were popular, he ended up spending the extra money on the unpopular ones. His non-fungal work was mostly compilation (his Myxomycetes of Great Britain, for example, is just a translation of Rostafinski's treatise of the previous year), and sometimes he blindly reproduced the authors of sources whose incompetency he was not qualified to recognize.


Image of Mordecai Cubitt Cooke from William Ashbrook Kellerman (1904 - 1907) Ohio Mycological Bulletin
Mordecai Cubitt CookeAfter many years as editor and publisher of the popular magazine Science Gossip, he sold it and started the more scientific publication Grevillea, for which he wrote most of the contents during the 20 years that he owned it. He was also very proud that both journals made money under him, but not under the people who took them over.

Sources

Mary P. English (1987) Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, Victorian Naturalist, Mycologist, Teacher & Eccentric


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Selected Publications

Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (1857 - 1879) Mycographia, seu Icones fungorum (Mycographia, Consisting of Pictures of Fungi)

Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (1871) Handbook of British Fungi

Miles Joseph Berkeley & Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (1877) "The fungi of Brazil, including those collected by J. W. H. Trail... In 1874" in The Journal of the Linnean Society. Botany 15 p. 363

Joszef Tomasz Rostafinski & Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (1877) The Myxomycetes of Great Britain
This is Cooke's translation of Rostafinski's Sluzowce Monographia. Cooke will probably be listed as the author in a library.

Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (1881 - 1891) Illustrations of British Fungi 8 vol. 1198 pp.


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Species

Laccaria amethystina (W. Hudson) Cooke
Marasmius cohaerans (Persoon: Fries) Cooke & Quélet
Peziza phyllogena Cooke
Spathularia velutipes Farlow & Cooke

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Genera

Peniophora Cooke
Sarcoxylon Cooke
Scutellinia (Cooke) Lambotte
Tarzetta (Cooke) Lambotte

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