BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 25 



Note on Asplenium fontaniim, by Mr. Tiios. Moore. 



r 



I add a remark to your account of Asplenium fontanun as a British 

 plant (p. 340). The Tooting habitat, for which you quote the *Phy- 

 tolog-ist' for 1852, is thus mentioned in my 'Handbook' (ed. 1848): 



"Found in 1845, growing in company with Asplenium Trichomanes 

 on an old wall near the mansion of the late D. Haigh, Esq., Tooting 

 Common, Surrey, where it had certainly not been lately introduced." 

 It was found by the gardener there, Mr. Gibbs, a most intelligent and 

 respectable man of advanced years, who had for a long while, some- 

 thing like half a lifetime, held the situation. He had not been pre- 

 viously a Fern-grower, and was certain that the plant had not been 

 artificially introduced within a period of almost half a century. This 

 carries us back to a date when Ferns were so little grown, or cared for 



as cultivated plants, that I am at a loss to conceive how the Asplenium 

 was to have reached such a position either accidentally or by design. 

 At the Hampshire habitat the plants, I am told, form large patches, 

 the size of \vhich, as this species is not a rapidly extending plant, 

 would give them an age to which the above consideration would apply 

 with scarcely less force. I may also incidentally mention, as it affects 

 another of our disputed species, that the same consideration applies to 

 the Leytou habitat of Cystopteris alpina, which plant is sometimes ex- 

 cluded from our Flora as unceremoniously as the Asplenium. Mr. W. 

 Pamplin tells me he well remembers that when quite a boy, which 

 must carry the observation back nearly or quite to the beginning of 

 the present century, he was in company with his father, who drove up 

 to the roadside wall on which '' the rare Fern" grew, and at that time 

 the appearance of the plant, now fresh in his memory, was as if 

 parsley had been sown along the wall. This Cystoptem does not 

 spread rapidly, and such an appearance, even if exaggerated by childish 

 inexperience, could only have resulted from its having been very long 

 established there. This would carry back the date so nearly a century, 

 that one naturally inquires who then cared for, or cultivated, or could have 

 artificially introduced such a Fern. Nowadays, when there is such a 

 furor for Ferns, a European species might become naturalized through 

 the proximity of cultivated specimens, but it was hardly likely to hap- 

 pen in the middle of the last century. Recurring to the Asplenium, the 

 following memoranda are quoted from my * Handbook' (first edition, 



VOL. VIII. 



B 



