OF THE’ Synopsis FiLticum 621 
from his Handbook of the Fern Allies (1887). This enumeration, 
however, is conservative and entirely inadequate. In the Schi- 
zaeaceae sixty species are included in Synopsis Filicum ; Prantl, 
who monographed this family in 1881, included eighty-nine spe- 
cies and that without having seen the Kew collection, which would 
have enabled him to add a number of species to his list. Synopsts 
Filicum gives twenty-two species of Polypodium § Niphobolus. In 
Giesenhagen’s recent monograph of Wiphobolus (1901) we have 
fitty species, and had he consulted the more ample range of ma- 
terials in the Kew herbarium he would certainly have found addi- 
tional species for his admirable monograph. In Kuhn’s Chaetop- 
terides nine species of /Jamesonia are placed under the new genus 
Psilogramme where Synopsis Filicum had reduced them to one, 
From the collection of materials at Kew included there under 
the Single cover marked Aspidium juglandifolium we have been 
forced to separate no less than eight well-marked species of 
Phanerophlebia and the tale is not all told yet. Synopsis Filicum 
teduced the world’s species of Botrychium to six, and Mr. Baker 
reiterates this number in his summary of new ferns in 1891 ; Prantl 
enumerated fifteen species in his synopsis in 1884, and this number 
is still too small as we have now at least that number of well estab- 
lished species of the genus within the limits of the United States 
alone. A paper by Miiller* describing six species in the small 
 §enus Vittaria has been entirely passed over in both Species 
Filicum and Synopsis Filicum. In Die natiirlichen Phlanzenfamilien 
(1901) Hieronymus gives 559 species of Selaginella against the 
335 Species recorded by Baker in 1887. Such examples as these 
show the extreme conservatism and incompleteness of this work 
and it is more than likely that when the next enumeration of the 
Pteridophytes is made the number of existing species will reach 
Six thousand, and perhaps more, for the species published as new 
during the last decade form a surprising list. 
But it is the treatment of genera in this work that we wish more 
“specially to consider, for there could scarcely be a more unnatural 
Or artificial system of genera than the Synopsis Filicum contains 
hiker - 
: : * Miiller, K. : Einige Worte iiber die Bedeutung des Zellenbaues fiir die Klassifi- 
_ Son, nebst Beschreibung sechs neuer arten der Farnngattung Vi#farta. Bot. Zeitung, 
9? 537-548. 1854. 
