1809 born in Reichenburg, Bohemia
1835 appointed director of the Bohemian National Museum, in Prague
(later the Prague National Museum)
1848 embarks on a collecting expedition to the wild Texas coast
1849 dies when his ship goes down in the Gulf of Mexico
Dörfelt & Heklau
say that it was through the assistance of
Krombholz that the
destitute Corda was allowed to study medicine (presumably at the University
of Prague, where
Krombholz was on the
faculty).
Corda's books are important for the study of early
mycology. His
Icones has
lovely drawings of many
fleshy fungi; it also
includes drawings of
setae, and the giant
cystidia of
Coprinus micaceus,
but his microscope doesn't seem to have had the resolution to get smaller
features accurately.
According to
Ramsbottom
(1953) , Corda
claimed that he gave a talk in 1832 presenting
basidia to the Royal
Prussian Academy of Sciences, but they would not accept his work. He
published some of the drawings from that talk in
Corda
(1839) . Also,
according to Lloyd
Corda, as a matter
of fact, was the next man to work with hypogaeal
fungi after
Vittadini, and he
named and figured (crudely) several of them. He sent them to
Berkeley and
Berkeley sent
them to
Tulasne, and
between the two they managed to get rid of most of Corda's names.
Lloyd
March 1925,
p. 74
The result of his Texas trip makes him one of the few mycologists to die
while collecting
fungi.
Lloyd notes: "It was
supposed his [Texas]
collections were lost
also, but there are in the museum at Berlin... a few
fungi collected in
Texas not marked from Corda, as I remember, but surely from him." It is not
clear how the
fungi got to Berlin;
he must have sent some
collections overland,
before his ship went down.
Lloyd says that the
drawing of Corda was (in 1922) in the possession of
Mattirolo, who told
Lloyd its provenance,
but
Lloyd forgot it.
Sources
Curtis Gates Lloyd
(1898 - 1925)
Mycological Notes
Heinrich Dörfelt &
Heike Heklau (1998)
Die Geschichte der Mykologie
(Die Geschichte der Mykologie)
John Ramsbottom
(1953)
Mushrooms and Toadstools