Curtis Gates Lloyd

Curtis Gates Lloyd (1859 - 1926)

Photo of Calvatia gigantea by John Denk

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Biography
Sources
Selected publications
Species
Genera

Biography

1859 July 17, born at Florence, Kentucky

private schooling in Florence and Crittendon, Kentucky

1879 apprenticeship to a pharmacist in Cincinnati, where he lives for the rest of his life

1880 bookkeeper for a publishing house

1886 becomes a partner with his brothers, John Uri Lloyd and Nelson Ashly Lloyd, in a wholesale drug firm

builds up a tremendous herbarium, partly on his own, partly through correspondence

sells share in the firm to his brothers, devotes himself totally to botany, especially mycology. Publishes Mycological Notes, a periodical devoted mainly to his own discoveries

1926 November 11, dies in Cincinnati
I have also seen his year of death listed as 1927

Lloyd was a quirky individual, even by the exacting standards of the world of mycology. Being independently wealthy and publishing his opinions in his own journal meant that he could sound off on whatever he wanted to, without fear of any consequences (except perhaps social ones). As a consequence, his writings are sometimes very entertaining. He even created a fictitious Professor McGinty to express especially cranky or contrarian views in his magazine.

Image of Pseudocolus fusiformis from Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck (1816 - 1817) Das System der Pilze und Schwämme

Given his professional immunity from criticism, he was amazingly conscientious and substantive in his mycological investigations, and his writings are in no way vanity publications. He used his pile of money to travel around Europe and the US, visiting herbaria and studying their type collections. He monographed several genera (in Mycological Notes) based on these studies, specializing in the non-gilled fungi (which had fewer (annoying) people working on them).

He had a mania for synonymizing, and was permanently angry with mycologists that declared new species based on a few specimens. And this had been a common practice since the early 19th century, as various European expeditions went out collecting things from all sorts of exotic locations and brought them back to Europe (and people like Berkeley and Hennings) to be named. Much of the time, Lloyd's criticisms were correct, as far as species were concerned: there were lots of species declared from a handful of shrivelled specimens from thousands of miles away, and then a new species declared on each new shrivelled handful. But he also extended his lumping views to genera, with absolutely disastrous results. He explicitly felt that genera were and should be artificial (I seem to remember him saying at one point that genera were just baskets to hold species), and that only the most extreme circumstances justified the creation of a new one. The idea of having a taxonomic system based on biological relatedness, or even on the greater convenience of having several moderate-sized genera replace one huge one, never seems to have occurred to him.

With his easy access to specimens and publication, he also published several new species of his own, and most of them have held up.
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Sources

Harry Baker Humphrey (1961) Makers of North American Botany

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Further Info

The Lloyd Library: Curtis Gates Lloyd

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Selected Publications

Curtis Gates Lloyd (1898 - 1925) Mycological Notes

Curtis Gates Lloyd (1902) "The genera of the Gasteromycetes" in Mycological Notes (Lloyd calls some volumes of this "Mycological Writings". I've stuck with "Mycological Notes" throughout.) January 1

Curtis Gates Lloyd (1902) "The Geasters" in Mycological Notes (Lloyd calls some volumes of this "Mycological Writings". I've stuck with "Mycological Notes" throughout.) 1

Curtis Gates Lloyd (1905) "The genus Bovistella" in Mycological Notes (Lloyd calls some volumes of this "Mycological Writings". I've stuck with "Mycological Notes" throughout.) 2:23 pp. 277 - 287

Curtis Gates Lloyd (1905) "The genus Mitremyces" in Mycological Notes (Lloyd calls some volumes of this "Mycological Writings". I've stuck with "Mycological Notes" throughout.) 2:30 pp. 238 - 243

Mitremyces is a genus of Nees von Esenbeck. Eduard Fischer synonymized it with Calostoma N. A. Desvaux

Species

Amanita volvata (Peck) Lloyd
Calvatia gigantea (Batsch: Persoon) Lloyd
Lentinus torulosus (Persoon: Fries) Lloyd
Pseudocolus fusiformis (E. Fischer) Lloyd
Volvariella villosavolva (Lloyd) Singer

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Genera

Pseudocolus Lloyd

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