MANTON: PTERIDOLOGY 



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tionist and his order of citation, though not strictly a pliylogeny, is nevertheless 

 phyletic in general intention. Many details are, however, traditional in the sense 

 that they go back at least to Goebel (1881) and often much earlier. An impor- 

 tant new idea had nevertheless been contributed by Campbell in 1890 and im- 

 mediately accepted by Bowser, namely, that the Eusporangiateae and not the 

 Leptosporangiatae represent the most ancient type of ferns. This reverses the 

 order of citation of the three main groups of Filicales in the list quoted on 

 page 307 and it also provides, for the first time, some definite criteria for at- 

 tempting to recognize the primitive groups within the Leptosporangiatae. The 

 story of how this was done, largely by the work of Bower, is very well known 

 and is described in the first volume of Bower's Ferns (1923). The detailed ap- 

 plication of Bower's selected criteria for the delimitation of primitive groups is 

 contained in Volume 2 of the Ferns (1926). The primitive position there as- 

 signed to the Gleicheniaceae, Schizaeaceae, Hymenophyllaceae, and Osmunda- 

 ceae is now generally accepted (cf. Copeland, 1947) but these still contain 

 only a minority of living leptosporangiate ferns, the greater number of which 



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Figure 2. Phyletic scheme after Bower, 1923. 



