Hosseusiella and Rehmanniella, two new genera in the Teloschistaceae

Two new genera in the subfamily Teloschistoideae (Teloschistaceae, Teloschistales) are described: Hosseusiella S. Y. Kondr., L. Lőkös et A. Thell for the Caloplaca chilensis group including three South American species and Rehmanniella S. Y. Kondr. et J.-S. Hur for the new species, R. wirthii S. Y. Kondr. from South Africa. The new genera are supported by a three-gene phylogeny based on ITS1/ITS2 nrDNA, 28S nrLSU, and 12S mtSSU sequences. The new taxonomic position of Elixjohnia ovis-atra in the subfamily Teloschistoideae is discussed. The two new species Hosseusiella gallowayiana and Rehmanniella wirthii are described, illustrated and compared with closely related taxa. Hosseusiella gallowayiana is recorded for the first time as the host for the lichenicolous fungus Arthonia tetraspora S. Y. Kondr. A key to the species of Hosseusiella is included, as well as new information of the related genus Follmannia. The following new combinations are proposed: Hosseusiella chilensis (Kärnefelt, S. Y. Kondr., Frödén et Arup) S. Y. Kondr., L. Lőkös, Kärnefelt et A. Thell, Hosseusiella pergracilis (Zahlbr.) S. Y. Kondr., L. Lőkös, Kärnefelt et A. Thell and Elixjohnia ovis-atra (Søchting, Søgaard et Sancho) S. Y. Kondr

Lichens from the Vadstena Monastery churchyard – the burial place of Eric Acharius

A list of 120 taxa observed at the Vadstena Monastery churchyard includes some rare species and a few lichenicolous fungi. Lecanora semipallida is reported from the province Östergötland [Ostrogothia] for the first time

Vitalism in Early Modern Medical and Philosophical Thought

Vitalism is a notoriously deceptive term. It is very often defined as the view, in biology, in early modern medicine and differently, in early modern philosophy, that living beings differ from the rest of the physical universe due to their possessing an additional ‘life-force’, ‘vital principle’, ‘entelechy’, enormon or élan vital. Such definitions most often have an explicit pejorative dimension: vitalism is a primitive or archaic view, that has somehow survived the emergence of modern science (the latter being defined in many different ways, from demystified Cartesian reductionism to experimental medicine, biochemistry or genetics: Cimino and Duchesneau eds. 1997, Normandin and Wolfe eds. 2013). Such dismissive definitions of vitalism are meant to dispense with argument or analysis. Curiously, the term has gained some popularity in English-language scholarship on early modern philosophy in the past few decades, where it is used without any pejorative dimension, to refer to a kind of ‘active matter’ view, in which matter is not reducible to the (mechanistic) properties of size, shape and motion, possessing instead some internal dynamism or activity (see e.g. James 1999, Boyle 2018, Borcherding forthcoming). The latter meaning is close to what the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth termed ‘hylozoism’, namely the attribution of life, agency or mind to matter, and he implicitly targeted several figures I shall mention here, notably Margaret Cavendish and Francis Glisson, for holding this view. However, one point I shall make in this entry is that when vitalism first appears by name, and as a self-designation, in the Montpellier School (associated with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montpellier, in the second half of the eighteenth century; thus vitalisme appears first, followed shortly thereafter by Vitalismus in German, with ‘vitalism’ appearing in English publications only in the early nineteenth century: Toepfer 2011), it is quite different from both the more ‘supernatural’ view described above – chiefly espoused by its rather obsessive opponents – and from the more neutral, but also de-biologized philosophical view (that of e.g. Cavendish or Conway who are, broadly speaking naturalists). Rather than appealing to a metaphysics of vital force, or of self-organizing matter, this version of vitalism, which I shall refer to as ‘medical vitalism’, seems to be more of a ‘systemic’ theory: an attempt to grasp and describe top-level (‘organizational’, ‘organismic’, ‘holistic’) features of living systems (Wolfe 2017, 2019). In this entry I seek to introduce some periodization in our thinking about early modern (and Enlightenment) vitalism, emphasizing the difference between the seventeenth-century context and that of the following generations – culminating in the ideas of the Montpellier School. This periodization should also function as a kind of taxonomy or at least distinction between some basic types of vitalism. As I discuss in closing, these distinctions can cut across the texts and figures we are dealing with, differently: metaphysical vs. non-metaphysical vitalism, philosophical vs. medical vitalism, medical vs. ‘embryological’ vitalism, and so on. A difference I can only mention but not explore in detail is that the more medically grounded, ‘organismic’ vitalism is significantly post-Cartesian while the more biological/embryological vitalism is, inasmuch as it is a dynamic, self-organizing matter theory, an extension of Renaissance ideas (chymiatry, Galenism and in general theories of medical spirits). I examine successively vitalism’s Renaissance prehistory, its proliferation as ‘vital matter theory’ in seventeenth-century England (in authors such as Cavendish, Conway and Glisson, with brief considerations on Harvey and van Helmont), and its mature expression in eighteenth-century Montpellier (notably with Bordeu and Ménuret de Chambaud)

Transoceanic Dispersal and Subsequent Diversification on Separate Continents Shaped Diversity of the Xanthoparmelia pulla Group (Ascomycota)

In traditional morphology-based concepts many species of lichenized fungi have world-wide distributions. Molecular data have revolutionized the species delimitation in lichens and have demonstrated that we underestimated the diversity of these organisms. The aim of this study is to explore the phylogeography and the evolutionary patterns of the Xanthoparmelia pulla group, a widespread group of one of largest genera of macrolichens. We used a dated phylogeny based on nuITS and nuLSU rDNA sequences and performed an ancestral range reconstruction to understand the processes and explain their current distribution, dating the divergence of the major lineages in the group. An inferred age of radiation of parmelioid lichens and the age of a Parmelia fossil were used as the calibration points for the phylogeny. The results show that many species of the X. pulla group as currently delimited are polyphyletic and five major lineages correlate with their geographical distribution and the biosynthetic pathways of secondary metabolites. South Africa is the area where the X. pulla group radiated during the Miocene times, and currently is the region with the highest genetic, morphological and chemical diversity. From this center of radiation the different lineages migrated by long-distance dispersal to others areas, where secondary radiations developed. The ancestral range reconstruction also detected that a secondary lineage migrated from Australia to South America via long-distance dispersal and subsequent continental radiation

A multigene phylogenetic synthesis for the class Lecanoromycetes (Ascomycota): 1307 fungi representing 1139 infrageneric taxa, 317 genera and 66 families

The Lecanoromycetes is the largest class of lichenized Fungi, and one of the most species-rich classes in the kingdom. Here we provide a multigene phylogenetic synthesis (using three ribosomal RNA-coding and two protein-coding genes) of the Lecanoromycetes based on 642 newly generated and 3329 publicly available sequences representing 1139 taxa, 317 genera, 66 families, 17 orders and five subclasses (four currently recognized: Acarosporomycetidae, Lecanoromycetidae, Ostropomycetidae, Umbilicariomycetidae; and one provisionarily recognized, ‘Candelariomycetidae’). Maximum likelihood phylogenetic analyses on four multigene datasets assembled using a cumulative supermatrix approach with a progressively higher number of species and missing data (5-gene, 5 + 4-gene, 5 + 4 + 3-gene and 5 + 4 + 3 + 2-gene datasets) show that the current classification includes non-monophyletic taxa at various ranks, which need to be recircumscribed and require revisionary treatments based on denser taxon sampling and more loci. Two newly circumscribed orders (Arctomiales and Hymeneliales in the Ostropomycetidae) and three families (Ramboldiaceae and Psilolechiaceae in the Lecanorales, and Strangosporaceae in the Lecanoromycetes inc. sed.) are introduced. The potential resurrection of the families Eigleraceae and Lopadiaceae is considered here to alleviate phylogenetic and classification disparities. An overview of the photobionts associated with the main fungal lineages in the Lecanoromycetes based on available published records is provided. A revised schematic classification at the family level in the phylogenetic context of widely accepted and newly revealed relationships across Lecanoromycetes is included. The cumulative addition of taxa with an increasing amount of missing data (i.e., a cumulative supermatrix approach, starting with taxa for which sequences were available for all five targeted genes and ending with the addition of taxa for which only two genes have been sequenced) revealed relatively stable relationships for many families and orders. However, the increasing number of taxa without the addition of more loci also resulted in an expected substantial loss of phylogenetic resolving power and support (especially for deep phylogenetic relationships), potentially including the misplacements of several taxa. Future phylogenetic analyses should include additional single copy protein-coding markers in order to improve the tree of the Lecanoromycetes. As part of this study, a new module (‘‘Hypha’’) of the freely available Mesquite software was developed to compare and display the internodal support values derived from this cumulative supermatrix approach.Keywords: Classification, Multi-gene phylogeny, Lichenized fungi, Systematics, Cumulative supermatrix, Lecanoromycete

Alectorioid morphologies in Paleogene lichens : New evidence and re-evaluation of the fossil Alectoria succini Mägdefrau

One of the most important issues in molecular dating studies concerns the incorporation of reliable fossil taxa into the phylogenies reconstructed from DNA sequence variation in extant taxa. Lichens are symbiotic associations between fungi and algae and/or cyanobacteria. Several lichen fossils have been used as minimum age constraints in recent studies concerning the diversification of the Ascomycota. Recent evolutionary studies of Lecanoromycetes, an almost exclusively lichen-forming class in the Ascomycota, have utilized the Eocene amber inclusion Alectoria succinic as a minimum age constraint. However, a re-investigation of the type material revealed that this inclusion in fact represents poorly preserved plant remains, most probably of a root. Consequently, this fossil cannot be used as evidence of the presence of the genus Alectoria (Parmeliaceae, Lecanorales) or any other lichens in the Paleogene. However, newly discovered inclusions from Paleogene Baltic and Bitterfeld amber verify that alectorioid morphologies in lichens were in existence by the Paleogene. The new fossils represent either a lineage within the alectorioid group or belong to the genus Oropogon.Peer reviewe

Remarkable transactions: How eighteenth-century travel literature transformed the geography of knowledge

Remarkable Transactions argues that eighteenth-century travel literature enabled British subjects to test out new narratives of knowledge in relation to the self. Travel narratives were one of the most widely read and published genres of the eighteenth century, particularly after the unprecedented success of William Dampier\u27s A New Voyage Round the World (1697). Few scholars have focused extensively on travel literature, however, because of its formal difficulties and complexities. Yet by tracking the travel genre alongside shifts in eighteenth-century epistemology, I show that travel texts played fundamental roles in the emergence of new concepts of truth, knowledge, and fact from the Restoration to the Enlightenment and beyond. Travel narratives inherently deal in questions of knowing because they dramatize the act of acquiring and relating new information about the world. They are also about the self because they tend to focus on the idiosyncratic experiences of a single individual. As a result, travel narratives become textual spaces in which authors explore the connections between scientific knowledge production and subjective experience. For instance, while Margaret Cavendish resists 1660s experimentalism through her focus on the unique capacities of the imagination, Daniel Defoe creates a fictional empiricism that recapitulates the true experience of the subjective individual. Much later in the century, James Cook strives to create a purely factual document of his travels. My comparison of his Journals with the contemporaneous travelogues of Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett, however, teases out the impossibility of suppressing the self in even the most seemingly objective accounts. It also highlights the evolving relationship between scientific and novelistic modes of representation. The travel genre allowed eighteenth-century authors to experiment with new epistemological concepts and perspectives in a way that shaped disciplines themselves. It was fundamental to both the literary and the scientific coming into their own as disciplines and as methods, and therefore illuminates the shared, intricately linked histories of these related discourses.