74 The Ottawa Naturalist. [July 



Where the frond is widest, some way above the middle, in fact 

 where it arches over to form the wide lip of the "vase" it so 

 closely resembles, the pinnae are extremely long and narrow, 

 tapering gradually to a pointed extremity; they look like long 

 streamers or pennants ; these pinnae are pinnatifid into narrow 

 oblong pinnules, something like the ultimate divisions of the 

 Cinnamon Fern but narrower. The plant spreads freely by 

 slender underground stolons ; as you walk along some shady path 

 through the woods, you will often see a great patch of wet ground 

 filled as with a shrubbery by these immense tufts of ostrich plumes 

 a wealth of green in riotous profusion. Looked at through the 

 undergrowth and brushwood of maples and other light-foliaged 

 trees, the scene is one of tropical luxuriance, you think of a New 

 Zealand forest of tree-ferns, or a jungle of dwarf palms in Brazil. 

 About the Osmundas I have alreadv spoken; and I shall 

 defer mention of the Adder's Tongue family with its two genera 

 of Ophioglossiim and Botrychium to a sequel, in it I hope to extend 

 the list of species already mentioned from about 20 to 36. The 

 paper will deal with two seasons of fern-hunting, chieflv from 

 headquarters on the Rideau, though once or twice involving a 

 day's journey by rail to points as far distant as Niagara, Muskoka 

 and the Algonquin Park. 



TWO KINDS OF WAR ONE IS CONSIDERED 

 NECESSARY AND THE OTHER IS NOT. 



By Henry Skinner, M.D., Philadelphia, Pa. 



War is said to be hell and it may be interesting to find at 

 least a partial reason whv this is so. One of the factors in 

 making this lurid fire and brimstone condition, where death 

 lurks, is what may be called armament, consisting of various 

 kinds of death-dealing devices. This, however, is not the most 

 important factor as man's devices do not succeed nearly so well 

 as those created by nature. The great death-dealing combina- 

 tion in war times is made up of three animals and a plant. The 

 plant is exceedingly small and it takes the highest powers of the 

 microscope to elucidate it properly. It goes by the name of 

 Bacillus typhosus and causes typhoid fever. The smallest of the 

 three animals is a protozoan, and it is also ver}^ small, as it 

 destroys the red corpuscles of the blood, and they are less than 

 one three-thousandeth of an inch in diameter. This animal is 

 known as the Plasmodium malariae. The other two factors are 

 insects and they are very common ones, the mosquito and the 



