1/9 



from winds or heavy rains. Every conservatory facing" 

 North and in the shadow of the house, is far better adapted 

 for a collection of British Fern gems, than for flowers. 

 In the garden, they are admirably fitted for rockery culture 

 where a little shade and shelter can be given them. In 

 this connection we can only express our regret that the 

 common weed forms of two or three species, Male Fern, 

 Lady Fern and Shield Fern as hawked about by vandal- 

 istic costermongers in the Spring, or displayed ignominously 

 in boxes outside nurserymen's shops, should constitute the 

 popular ideal of our British Ferns, and figure monotonously 

 in thousands of gardens by the dozen and by the score, 

 while the great store of far more beautiful and varied 

 material such as we have described, is all but utterly 

 ignored. 



Finally, in scientific hands it has been found that our 

 native Ferns, in addition to their external "sportive" 

 character, afford many equally remarkable and instructive 

 variants in their reproductive phenomena and cell for- 

 mation generally. This branch, however, is of too technical 

 a nature to admit here of more than an allusion, it con- 

 stitutes a unique chapter in itself. 



Charles T. Druery. 



THE TRANSMUTATION (?) OF LASTREA 



^MULA. 



The late Mr. E. J. Lowe, whose name is so well known 

 to every lover and grower of Ferns, and whose writings 

 have done and still are doing so much for Fern culture, 

 makes in his little popular book " British Ferns," which 

 was published in the Young Collector Series, 1890, by 

 Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., a curious statement about 

 the transmutation of one species into another. This is the 

 passage, which occurs on page 145 : — 



" In a wood at Hackness, near Scarborough (I am 

 " speaking of twenty years ago), N, dilatatum was near the 



