104 The Ottawa Naturalist. [Sept. 



I was expecting a brother botanist from England to spend the 

 summer with me, and you may imagine my elation at being able 

 to show him the Adder's Tongue Fern in its native haunt. 



The colony was so small that I kept close watch over it and 

 when hay-fields began to be cut I strode sternly out to defend 

 my proprietary rights. Fortunately my comer was arid and 

 sandy, the grass so short and thin that no mowers had been to 

 molest the Adder's Tongue; no mowers, but the devil disguised 

 as a horse had come and cropped the few spikes I had added to 

 the first find. Domestication seems to distort good wholesome 

 animal instincts into unnatural appetites; the horse is bad 

 enough, but for depraved tastes commend me of all things to 

 that clumsy rum.inant, the common cow; a creature so prosaic, 

 too, that aesthetic considerations seem lost to it; among its 

 favorite food plants I may mention the Plantain-leaved Ladies' 

 Tresses, the Narrow-leaved Spleenwort (especially when rare in 

 the neighbourhood), and the Adder's Tongue Fern. 



About the middle of July the two of us went out to see the 

 colony and inspected the bank of the stream a little further down; 

 we found hundreds of plants, usually near the foot of steep slopes; 

 we then tried the far bank, my friend unsuccessfully, but I 

 detected several colonies, and at one spot some plants newly 

 trodden down; the footprint was my friend's. I called him to 

 me and made merry at his expense, showing where he had walked 

 and trampled under foot fronds 7 or 8 inches long of the fern he 

 was looking for ; he rather took the wind out of my sails by point- 

 ing out some still larger plants on which I was kneeling. It is a 

 most inconspicuous fern, but far from rare. However, we still 

 clung desperately to the cherished belief that it was rare; true, 

 it was plentiful along this stream, but that was only one station 

 and probably (we concluded) a lucky find. 



A week later we had flitted with our botany cans 100 miles 

 or more east to the village of Lanark, north of Perth. We were 

 returning across country to the village from a bluff on the upper 

 part of the Clyde River where the Rusty Woodsia (Woodsia 

 ilvensis) grew ; our way led across undulating pastures and grain 

 fields, an elevated and rocky stretch; here and there a small 

 wood now lying in a hollow, now hanging on a hill-side or perched 

 on a knoll. In some of these upland pastures near the edges of 

 marshy ground we found great patches of Selaginella a pus, that 

 pretty little cousin of the club-mosses, with its bright yellow- 

 green prostrate branches forming thick mats in the spongy turf. 



We went along a sloping pasture towards a wooded ridge in 

 the distance; and as we surmounted a fence that ran from a 

 little wood tilted half way up the slope to a willow swamp below 



