110 The Ottawa Naturalist. [Dec. 



my stay ended I found many other stations for the Hart's 

 Tongue, several miles west of Owen Sound, also on the Rocky 

 Saugeen, near Durham and close to Wiarton. Had this 

 ended my successes I should have been well satisfied. But 

 a delightful surprise was still in store for me. Prof. Macoun's 

 catalogue of 1890 mentions for many of the ferns the name 

 of Mrs. Roy, of Roystone Park, Owen Sound. Among the 

 late Mrs. Roy's recorded finds is the Male Fern, "at the foot of 

 cliffs behind Roystone, and under the same line of cliffs 

 some ten miles up the coast." Finding that Roystone Park 

 was a farm, I called on the tenant, and was directed across hay 

 fields, past the shooting butts, to the cliffs in question. Not 

 five minutes' search — though the record is probably 30 years 

 old — revealed the plant, its identity being all the less question- 

 able because I had so often gathered its fronds in England, 

 Wales and Scotland. But so rare is it in our part of Canada, 

 that I had never seen it at all on this continent, and indeed 

 there is no other station for it known in Ontario. Not only was 

 it abundant at the back of Roystone, but two or three plants 

 were found in sheltered crannies of talus on the adjoining lot. 

 As soon as opportunity served, I made an expedition by buggy 

 up the coast as far as Kemble, and back to the cliffs behind this 

 village. Here the Male Fern was again discovered, both below 

 the cliff and in the woods above, robust, luxuriant and plentiful, 

 occasionally hybridising with its neighbour and congener, the 

 Marginal Shield Fern. But how is one to account for such a 

 limited range in the Province? Two stations about 10 miles 

 apart, with a diameter, the one, of some SO yards, the other, 

 of perhaps half a mile, in the single county of Grey and nowhere 

 else. 



On August the 10th my wife and I had arranged to set up 

 our usual summer tent on Cache Lake, in the Algonquin Park. 

 Shortly before that date I made a trip from Owen Sound to 

 Durham, in the hope of finding Pellaea densa, the extremely 

 rare Cliff-brake discovered there by Dr. H. M. Ami some years 

 ago. Unfortunately the date fixed for our trip proved the day 

 of the great gale and rainstorm over Lake Ontario, and the west 

 of the Province. It had already begun to rain when Durham 

 was reached, and conditions grew rapidly worse for the rest of 

 the stay. Bad weather and lack of time combined to make 

 three proposed trips impossible, two from Owen Sound and the 

 third from Utterson, on the way up to the Algonquin Park, 



To be continued. 



