1924] Weatherby,—Another Davenport Fern Herbarium 53 
amateur of New York who gathered a considerable herbarium of 
ferns and evidently came to know them well and to take a highly 
intelligent interest in the problems of their classification. In parti- 
cular he was attracted to the group of scaly Cheilanthes of the south- 
western United States, the taxonomic difficulties of which have 
recently been so happily cleared up by Dr. Maxon.! In the fall of 
1879 he visited New Haven where he spent several days in examining 
Eaton’s material? and devised a scheme of classification which, as 
the admirably clear statements in his letters show, agreed not only 
essentially, but in many details, with that worked out long afterward 
and quite independently by Maxon. He separated the same species 
(except C. villosa which he evidently had not seen) and by the same 
characters of rootstock and scales. 
Stout submitted his conclusions to Eaton, apparently with per- 
mission to use them as he liked in the “Ferns of North America,” 
then still in process of publication, and to Davenport. Eaton, as one 
of his letters shows, was at first sufficiently impressed not only to 
give a manuscript name to one of Stout’s species,’ the Californian 
plant now to be known as C. Covillei Maxon, but actually to send a 
description of it to the Torrey Bulletin for publication. Before it 
could be printed, however, he changed his mind and withdrew it, 
remarking to Davenport, “Mr. Stout may publish the species, which 
is really his own, if he wishes.” Davenport, after some vacillation, 
proved rather more receptive. In Feb., 1880, he even wrote a long 
letter to Eaton urging the recognition of the Californian plant as a 
species. But before this letter was copied, the receipt of new specimens 
which broke down a character he thought he had discovered caused 
him also to change his mind, and the letter was never sent. He was 
still disposed to recognize Stout’s segregates as varieties of C. Fendlert, 
a disposition of them which by no means satisfied Stout. Finally 
the matter was referred to J. G. Baker at Kew; he replied that all 
! Proc. Biol. Soc. Washington xxxi. 139-152 (Nov. 29, 1918). 
? “ Professor Eaton," he writes to Davenport, ‘‘received me with the utmost kind- 
ness and courtesy, much better than I knew how to treat him, and I could not help 
feeling myself at a disadvantage in that regard. I feel very uncomfortable in being 
so much in the attitude of questioning his judgment and can but deprecate my too 
direct manner of expressing my opinion when my mind is clear. My comfort is that 
the facts have seemed to support me.” The passage speaks clearly of the quality of 
both men. 
3 See Maxon, op. cit. 148. 
