the American Botanist 



VOL. XXII JOLIET, ILL., FEBRUARY, 1916 No. 1 



Gvery clod feels a stir of might 



J%n instinct within it that reaches and towers 

 Jind groping blindly above it for light 



Climbs to a soul in the grass and the f towers. 



— Lowell. 



THE TREE FERNS OF HAWAII 



By Vaughan MacCaughey. 



r I 'HE tree ferns are undoubtedly a declining race. Long 

 "*■ ago the humid epoch of their dominance waxed and 

 waned. The coal beds reveal the deathless delicacy of those 

 ancient fronds. The slate strata are sprinkled with the leaf- 

 prints of the primitive plant-world. Few sights stir the botanic 

 imagination as does a cabinet of fern fossils. Each fragment 

 visualizes an earth-epoch antedating" today by immeasurable 

 vastnesses of time. The cinematograph-reel of paleobotany 

 whirls back, and flashes strange pictures of illimitable jungle- 

 forests — -skirting the world mountains, girdling the Poles, cov- 

 ering great areas of China, Australia, and many other lands. 

 The coal and oil fields of today are the herbaria, the cemetarics. 

 of those spacious Carboniferous swamps. 



Recent studies in paleobotany have necessitated extensive 

 revisions of current ideas concerning' the Carboniferous fern- 

 llora. The prevalent conception of the arborescent pterido- 

 phytes as constituting the major part of the swamp-forest veg- 

 etation, has been demonstrated to be erroneous. Many of the 





