618 UnpERwoop: THE GENUS GYMNOGRAMME 
work containing a systematic treatment of the ferns of the entire 
world in a convenient form, has been adopted as a guide to practi- 
cally all the great collections of ferns. On this account, but not 
without many silent and published protests, its conclusions re- 
garding the limitations of both genera and species have been very 
widely adopted. 
Protests against the irrational treatment of genera in this useful 
work are nothing new and did not originate far from the head- 
quarters of the work itself, for no more vigorous restrictions have 
ever been drawn on its generic arrangement than those of John 
Smith, the distinguished gardener of Kew, where the present col- 
lection of living ferns notable among the great collections of the 
world, was largely brought together through the energy and in- 
fluence of this careful worker and furnished the living material on 
which Smith based a generic system for ferns vastly more logical 
than anything that Kew has ever produced in the natural arrange- 
ment of this group. Smith’s results do not differ very widely 
from those of Moore, another English protester against the Kew 
system ; from those of Fée, the -brilliant but somewhat isolated 
worker at Strasburg ; and especially from those of the most liberal 
of all fern systematists, Carl B. Presl of Prag. 
Were the specific limitations of the fern systematists at Kew to 
be characterized by a single word, it would be conglomeration — 
the essence of a practice somewhat vulgarly known as “ lumping, 
—and one who desires to do honest and critical work to-day ' 
forced to unravel the tangles into which specific limitation has 
been twisted, in connection with the ample materials that this 
noblest of all fern collections affords, by tracing the threads of m5 
tangle back to their original type localities, and by introducing 
into their understanding the element of geographic distribution 
which has always cut too slight a figure in the determinations of 
the Kew pteridographers. We can best illustrate this condition 
by a specific case. Under the species Lomaria attenuata, Synops® 
Filicum gives (p. 176) the following distribution : 
‘« America from the West Indies and Guatemala southward to Brazil and Juan a 
nandez ; Polynesian Islands, Norfolk Island, Mauritius, Bourbon, Fernando Po 
Cape Colony.” 
When we come to examine the specimens of this seemingly 
