being dense, others iax, some on fan-like plans, others 

 corymbose or bunchy, some long and pendulous and others 

 stiftand erect, the number of distinct varieties is very great, 

 especially as it has been demonstrated that crossing is 

 practicable, so that crests have been imparted thereby to 

 non-crested varieties endowed with other characters. 



C. T. D. 



FERN W^ONDERS. 



Few people when on their holiday rambles they see the 

 common Ferns of the wayside lining the hedges and ditches, 

 or, penetrating into the woods and glens, find them forming 

 the chief vegetation, filling every chink and cranny with 

 their feathery verdure, reflect or know that in the dim and 

 distant past, such a growth, on a more luxuriant scale was 

 slowly building up the Coal upon which the material pros- 

 perity of Britain is so largely founded. Yet in those old 

 days, Ferns and their allies, only differing in minor details 

 from those of the present, century after century, sucked up 

 the carbonic acid in the air around them, built the solid 

 carbon into their tissues, and eventually, as generation 

 after generation died and decayed banked up, as it were, this 

 imperishable element for man to use thousands of centuries 

 later. This is no scientific guesswork, the very fern-fronds, 

 as every coal miner knows, are often to be seen intact and 

 recognizable when the virgin coal is split by the pick, and 

 scores of species have been thus found and identified as 

 close relatives of our Ferns of to-day, At the Coal 

 Exchange, London, is a fine collection open to the view of 



the incredulous. 



Ferns to-day, owing to their lack of flowers, take a back 



seat with lovers of bright colours, but, wonder number two, 



even as our coal tar yields our aniline dyes, so it is evident 



that in those simple green fronds lie bottled-up rainbows 



resolvable by the alchemy of time into their most brilliant 



hues, so that many a dame decked in the brightest tints, 



outrivalling the rose itself, owes her borrowed colours to 



the ferns of aeons past. 



