Needing relief from the details of spore ornamentation and cuticular structure of the North American species of Russula, I thought I would take this occasion to raise my sights to higher taxonomic levels. Ideas on classification of all the great groups of fungi have changed markedly during the past fifty years. And, it seems to me, the systematic revolutions in the phycomycetes and ascomycetes have been promulgated in textbooks and other broad mycological works and are now widely accepted.... The situation in the basidiomycetes appears different, however. Here, even recent general works accept certain major taxa which for some time have seemed to specialists hardly defensible on the basis of what is know about the fungi. What I want to do in this address, then, is offer my views on a taxonomic system for the major groups of basidiomycetes.