o5 



cultivated it, thus ascertaining that the constitutional varia- 

 tion was a permanent condition. Eventually he sent me 

 some fronds, perfectly green in the dead of winter, and as 

 they were fertile I sowed them and obtained an abundant 

 crop, all of which proved so far from being deciduous that 

 *' sempercrescens " rather than " sempervirens " is appro- 

 priate, since it grows continually, and at the moment of 

 writing (April) there is a pot of it with last year's fronds 

 perfect and a number of new ones rising, while C. fvagilis 

 proper is only just moving. The term "vandalism" is 

 obviously appropriate, strong as it is, when new discoveries 

 are nipped in the bud as it were by precisely those people 

 who ought to know better, and since such records have 

 come before me by pure chance it is to be feared that they 

 only represent a small percentage of the actual cases where 

 the herbarium has proved to be the grave of precious finds. 

 Some time back, also in the United States, a new fern was 

 recorded. Here the discoverer merely took all the first 

 crop of fronds for his herbarium, kindly leaving the root 

 intact, but in the same season he told a friend and the latter 

 visited the spot and took the second crop, an operation from 

 which it is almost certain the plant would never recover. 

 Another case occurred in Scotland, where I was told of the 

 habitat, not this time of a new fern, but of a rare species. 

 When guided to the spot not a trace of the fern could be 

 found, but I learned that a professor had visited the place 

 just previously with a body of students, and the presump- 

 tion is that again the herbarium had been enriched at the 

 expense of the local flora. Chas. T. Druery. 



The Editor would remind the Members that Messrs. 

 H. B. May & Sons, Edmonton, are distributing true 

 plants of P. aculeatum gracillimum Drueryii. 



