50 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



CYSTOPTERIS MONTANA, BERNHARDI, IN 

 STIRLINGSHIRE. 



By A. SOMERVILLE, B.Sc., F.L.S. 



4 



IT is always gratifying to be able to add to the previously 

 known stations in this little country of ours, Scotland, for 

 any local organism, be it plant or animal. Our indigenous 

 ferns many of them at least are dainty things, and in- 

 formation as to extension of their range is of interest, more 

 especially when the species happens to be one confined to 

 those higher levels, the flora of which is so linked with that 

 of Scandinavia, and also, in a more distant degree, with the 

 flora of the elevated areas of Central Europe. 



Cystoptcris moritana of Bernhardi, the Mountain Bladder 

 Fern, is one of our rarest Cryptogamce vasculares. With 

 what may be termed decidedly arctic sympathies, it usually 

 selects for its habitat a moist situation in " cloud-land," at 

 between 2300 and 3600 feet, with a northern, or, in one case, 

 a north-western exposure, and where it will receive little of 

 the direct rays of the sun. 



When on Ben Lomond in August last (1894), in 

 company with Mr. Robert Kidston, F.G.S., Colonel J. S. 

 Stirling of Gargunnock, and Dr. R. Braithwaite, F.L.S. , 

 author of the " British Moss Flora," I had the pleasure to meet 

 with this interesting plant, previously unrecorded for Stirling- 

 shire, recognising its deltoid, very compound fronds and long 

 stipes from having seen them on hills north of Glen Lochay, 

 Mid-Perthshire, in 1888. Mr. Arthur Bennett, F.L.S., to 

 whom the plant has been submitted, remarks in connection 

 with it : "I think the Cystopteris must be C. montana, though 

 certainly the glandular setae are much less numerous than 

 usual." Fronds only were brought away by me, and it is to 

 be hoped that this local species may spread at its newly 

 found station, viz. the wet grassy ledges of the precipitous 

 cliffs of the northern face of the hill, at about 3000 feet, 

 and in company with its congener C. fragilis, Bernh. 



It is somewhat remarkable that though Ben Lomond 



