63 



fronds peep out from every chink, and here, in the very 

 heart of a clamp of the common form, is one of the most 

 diverse fashion conceivable. To get it, it has to be literally 

 sorted out of the bunch of fronds and roots of its purely 

 normal companions, and yet it is not only a thoroughbred 

 variety, lasselled, curled, or what not, but every spore it 

 subsequently bears may breed true as a die, and, under 

 quite different and varied environments, will reproduce 

 the type to a nicety generation after generation. 



As for fern adaptation to environment, it is quite possible 



that, had it not been found, it would have been smothered 



by its fellows, for tasselling, congesting, and dwarfing are 



always at expense of height, and that means handicapping to 



a certain extent. In this connection, too, the extreme 



diversity of the variations should logically imply a great 



diversity of environment, while, as we have seen, there is 



none at all. The " sport," too, is, judging by its subsequent 



true offspring, diverse in character even in the first frond, 



and hence the sport originated in the very ovum itself, or 



in the spore which was shed from one of the normal plants 



around. If the sport existed in the spore, we arrive at a 



local affection of the mother-frond, which bore millions of 



spores, one of which, at any rate, was subtly modified so as 



to produce a new form ; and here our environmental 



difference narrows down to part of one frond out of many 



on the plant, itself one of thousands all growing together 



under the same or such similar conditions as could not 



necessitate so great a change of form as a requisite factor 



of existence or even as a facility, since, as we have seen, 



the effect may be adverse instead of favourable. To my 



mind, this question of variation is an inscrutable one at 



present, that is, the initial original variation, of which the 



fern prints I shall show you portray the actual examples. 



{To be continued.) 



