1905] Fernald, An Alpine Adiantum IQI 
great surprise to find on the Shickshock Mountains of the Gaspé 
Peninsula a beautiful Adiantum covering hundreds of acres of alpine 
tableland. There, on the naked tableland of Mt. Albert and along 
the ice-cold streams of the alpine district, is an Adiantum forming 
broad bands of blue-green wherever the water from the cold bogs or 
melting snow-fields trickles through crevices of the greenish-brown 
serpentine. 
Ordinarily the plant is strongly caespitose, very many stiff glaucous 
stipes springing from the crowns of the firmly entangled rootstocks. 
These rigid stipes are rarely more than 2 decimeters high, often 
scarcely 1 dm., though exceptional clumps have stipes fully 2.5 dm. 
tall. The blue-green fronds are from o.5 to 2 dm. across, and the 
pinnae usually strongly ascending, without the long graceful curve 
which in A. pedatum causes the tips of the primary branches nearly 
to meet. In exposed sunny situations the small firm pinnules are 
peculiarly twisted, but in sheltered ravines they are quite flat and 
normal. ` 
The plant is evidently a close ally of our Alleghenian Adiantum 
pedatum, but careful comparison with this plant of the woodlands 
shows the Mt. Albert fern to have certain characters which are note- 
worthy. Besides its small stature, ascending scarcely recurved pin- 
nae and very firm texture the Adiantum of the Shickshocks differs 
in having the lower marginal rib of the pinnules more prominent, 
while the finer veins of the pinnules are more obscure than in 4. 
pedatum. The teeth at the tips of the pinnules of the Mt. Albert 
plant are acute and often very fine, while those of the Alleghenian 
A. pedatum are rounded. But the best character, perhaps, is in the 
indusium. In 4. pedatum this is transversely linear, varying much 
in length (usually from 2 to 5 mm. long) but always of a linear or 
short-oblong outline (about 1 mm. broad). In the Mt. Albert plant 
the indusia are more lunate, rarely twice as long as broad. 
Study of the material in the Gray Herbarium shows that the plant 
of Mt. Albert, though usually dwarfed, is the characteristic Adiantum 
of wet rocks and mountain-gulches from Idaho and California north 
to Alaska, where it has passed as 4. pedatum, and that it reappears 
in northeastern Asia. It is unquestionably the fern listed without 
description by Presl as Adiantum boreale “ ( A. pedatum ex Unalaschka 
Kaulf. et herb. Chamisso),”* which was afterward taken up and 
! Presl, Tent. Pterid. 158 (1836). 
