78 



her own amongst the male ferns as doughtily as any new 

 woman among mankind. Polypodinms, vulgare, dry- 

 opteviSf and phegopteris, were also well to the fore, 

 Cystopteris fvagilis peeped out from many a stone dyke or 

 rocky crevice. Asplenium tricJiomanes and A. adiantum 

 nignim occasionally were plentiful, and A. viride lurked in 

 damp nooks in the rocky walls of out-of-the-way glens, as 

 wel) as high up on the hills in the open. Polystichtim 

 aculeatum was not plentiful, but cropped up unexpectedly as 

 fine solitary specim.ens here and there, and in some of the 

 glens made a fair show, hanging down from crevices in the 

 precipitous rock walls, with great bunches of old and dead 

 fronds pendulous beneath them. P. lonchitis, the holly fern, 

 is rarely obtained in situ without a climb of between two 

 thousand and three thousand feet, but I was conducted by 

 a friend, under a vow of discretion, to a populous habitat 

 of this fine fern, situated certainly below one thousand four 

 hundred feet above sea level, and growing there in pro- 

 fusion, and to the full size of eighteen inches or more in 

 height, its bright green fronds sticking up boldly through 

 the heather, so that at a distance I took them for robust 

 fertile fronds of Blechmim spicant, which, by the way, is also 

 one of the plentiful ferns of the district. Hunting, of 

 course, for varieties, I came across a curiously-partial 

 congested form, all the fronds having most of the pinnae 

 pinched as it were together. By the roadside, close to this 

 habitat, Boivychium Innavia, or the moon wort, was found as 

 tiny plants, under an inch high, growing in dry soil 

 among short grass, where my conductor informed me he 

 had known it to exist for thirty years. On my return from 

 this trip a visitor showed me a plant he had just gathered 

 close to the Tay Bridge at Aberfeldy, but on searching 

 for another I failed to hit upon one, and got instead a 

 remarkably pretty plant of one of the plantain weeds, 

 each leaf margined with pure white. As the trip to the 

 aforesaid holly domain involved some miles of road, 



