THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 25 



Here I stumbled upon a few clumps with the fertile fronds 

 in fruit and marked the spot as holding the only ro3^al 

 ferns in the vicinity'. The next summer, however, in a 

 cedar swamp on the Lansing Farm, a little below the city, 

 I found O. regalis almost as common as O. cinnamomea 

 and O. Claytoniana. The common polypod^^ {Polvpod- 

 ium vulgare) is less common than its name would impl3^ ; 

 it grows in profusion where it grows at all but I find it in 

 very few places as compared with the other common ferns. 

 The Christmas fern {Polystichum acrostichoides) grows 

 in the woods everywhere. 



My next find was a small station of slender cliff brake 

 {Pellxa gracilis). It was June when I discovered them 

 and both fertile and sterile fronds were at their lovliest. 

 I was one of a picnic party, but I happened to be alone 

 walking along the edge of a creek and looking for ferns on 

 the shelving rocks above mj' head. Suddenly I spied 

 something new, a bed of ferns unlike an3'thing I had seen 

 before. The3^ were so exactlj' like their picture even to the 

 background the3^ had chosen that I knew them at once. 

 The last fern on m3^ list was added last year, the little 

 grape fern {Botrychium simplex). I tound it in three quite 

 wideW separated localities but alwa3^s in the same soil 

 and with the same general surroundings. 

 Little Falls, N. Y. 



TENDERFOOT NOTES FROM SOUTHERN CALI- 

 FORNIA. 



BY CHARLES FRANCIS SAUNDERS. 

 'T'HE world is so accustomed to hear of California's big 

 -L fruits and vegetables that perhaps the botanical 

 tourist from the modest East should not be surprised to 

 find plant families which at home he knows onh^as herbs, 

 represented in the Land of Sunshine by shrubs, and shrubs 

 corresponding^ 1)3^ trees. 



The evidences of this fact have contributed entertain- 

 ment to man3" of our outings in southern California, The 



