The multitude of seeds produced by an Agaric or a Boletus is innumerable! It is astonishing! Yet not one in ten thousand answers the purpose of propagation. Is not the air we breathe charged with them all the declining part of the year ? Do we not receive them into our lungs with every breath we draw? Whence proceed the quinsies, coughs and other complaints which prevail in Autumn? JAMES BOLTON: An History of British Ferns (Huddersfield, 1790)
Introduction. Thommen's postulates re-statedOf all the causes of inhalant allergy, known or suspected, none lend themselves more readily to scientific investigation than do pollen grains and fungus spores. Plant spores in the widest sense are found in all divisions of the plant kingdom but only those formed by the flowering plants (and known as pollen grains) and the fungi contribute significantly to the aerospora; other phyla produce airborne spores, but these are numerically of minor importance.* (Bacteria, except for the Actinomycetes, are outside our present terms of reference.) In an efl"ort to focus attention on those flowering plants which are the proper concern of allergists Thommen (1931) proposed five postulates all of which he said should be known to apply to a plant before it should be regarded as a probable cause of epidemic or widespread hay fever. These postulates have been widely accepted: they were, however, put forward when the use of aerobiological methods in the service of allergy had only just begun and when the very existence of fungus spore allergy had been barely hinted at. They are now due to be revised to meet modern requirements. The following re-statement is proposed:
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