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CYSTOPTERIS MONTANA, BERNHARDI, IN STIRLINGSHIRE, 215 
Cystopteris montana, Bernhardi, in Stirlingshire. 
By A. Somervi11e, B.Sc., F.LS. 
[Read 25th September, 1894. ] 
Ir is gratifying to be able at any time to add to the previously 
known stations in this little country of ours, Scotland, for any 
local organism, be it plant or animal. Our indigenous ferns— 
many of them at least—are dainty things, and information as to 
extension of their range is of interest, more especially when the 
species happens to be one confined to those higher levels; the flora 
of which is so linked with that of Scandinavia, and also, in a 
more distant degree, with the flora of the elevated areas of 
Central Europe. 
Cystopteris montana of Bernhardi, the Mountain Bladder Fern, 
is one of our rarest Cryptogame vasculares. With what may be 
termed decidedly arctic sympathies, it usually selects for its 
habitat a moist situation in clowd-land, at between 2,300 and | 
3,600 feet, with a northern, or, in one case, a north-western 
exposure, and where it will receive little of the direct rays of the 
sun. 
When on Ben Lomond in August last (1894), in company with 
Mr. Robert Kidston, F.G.S., Colonel J. 8. Stirling of Gargunnock, 
and Dr. R. Braithwaite, F.L.S., author of the “British Moss 
Flora,” I had the pleasure to meet with this interesting plant, 
previously unrecorded for Stirlingshire, recognising its deltoid, 
very compound fronds, and long stipes, from having seen them on 
hills north of Glen Lochay, Mid-Perthshire, in 1888. Mr. Arthur 
Bennett, F.L.S., to whom the plant has been submitted, remarks 
in connection with it: “I think the Cystopteris must be C. 
montana, though certainly the glandular sete are much less 
numerous than usual.” Fronds only were brought away by me, 
and it is to be hoped that this local species may spread at its 
newly-found station, viz., the wet grassy ledges of the precipitous 
cliffs of the northern face of the hill, at about 3,000 feet, and in 
company with its congener, C. fragilis, Bernh, 
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