Edward Angus Burt papers

Edward Angus Burt (1859-1939) was a mycologist and an authority on a family of terrestrial fungi, the Thelephoraceae. He was born in Athens, Pennsylvania and was educated at the State Normal School of Albany, NY, where he taught natural history from 1880 to 1885. He obtained his M.A. (1894) and Ph.D. (1895) at Harvard University studying under William G. Farlow and Roland Thaxter. He was Professor of Natural History at Middlebury College, Vermont from 1895 to 1913 whereupon he joined the Missouri Botanical Garden as Mycologist and Librarian from 1913 to 1933. He held a concurrent position as Professor of Botany at the Henry Shaw School of Botany at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Dr. Burt’s work focused on the systematic study of the Thelephoraceae, a family of fungi whose fruiting bodies are often resupinate (flat on the substrate). He published a series of articles on thelephore taxonomy in the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, later published as The Thelephoraceae of North America, I-XV (1914-1926). His research encompassed systematic description of basidiomycetes such as Merulius and fungi from Vermont, Siberia, and Java. Among his many publications he was author of descriptive text for Icones Farlowianae (1929) by William G. Farlow.