FILICES. 43 



the road from Goose-green to St. Laurence ; it was about i mile from 

 G-oose-green, on a high bank, looking towards the south-west, faced 

 up with stones, in the interstices of which it grew ; it was far past 

 its prime, and much of it quite dried up. Before it was ascer- 

 tained to occur in Jersey, it was reported from Aberdeenshire. Mr. 

 W. W. Spicer published in the * Phy tologist ' for 1862, p. 600, a 

 letter from Miss Yeitch, in which she states she discovered it "in a 

 stone dyke on the high-road, on the right-hand side, leading from 

 Braemar to Ballater, nearly opposite Invercauld House, and as far 

 as I remember where the Highlanders perform their annual feats at 

 the gathering, viz., a rock called ' the Lion's Face,' at the foot of 

 which, enclosing trees, is the above-named dyke." No one else, how- 

 ever, has found the plant in this station, and it is scarcely conceivable 

 that it could exist in so cold a climate. Doubtless some mistake 

 has been made. 



Channel Islands. Annual or biennial. Spring. 



Caudex very minute, roundish, simple, sending out woolly root- 

 fibres with from 4 or 5 fronds in the Jersey specimens, which vary 

 from 1 to 2^ inches high. In Portuguese specimens there are some- 

 times 8 or 9 fronds with the tallest 6 to 8 inches high. The fronds 

 which are first produced are sterile ; the earliest of these is not above 

 \ or ^ inch long, and has a roundish trifid lamina with dichoto- 

 mously lobed segments ; the succeeding fronds are longer and more 

 compound, but still are only accidentally fertile ; the pinnse of these 

 are about \ inch long. The fertile fronds have a much longer and 

 stouter stipes ; they are much more decompound, pale green, thin, 

 soon becoming tinged with olive-yellow ; the primary rachis is very 

 narrowly winged, with a herbaceous stripe running from each pinna ; 

 the rachides of the pinnae are much more broadly winged, sometimes 

 so much so that the pinnae cannot be said to be more than pinna- 

 tipartite. In very luxuriant specimens the pinnules are again 

 pinnatipartite, but in the small specimens, such as those I have seen 

 from Jersey, they cannot be termed more than lobed, and are about 

 ■§• inch long. The sori are yellowish, and before coalescing appear 

 as if forked ; this arises from their being continued along the course 

 of the veins from the last fork down to their apex, which is a little 

 within the margin of the segment. Spores dark brown, areolate. 

 The stipes contains a single reniform vascular bundle; the hair-like 

 scales are at first white, afterwards brown. 



According to Moore, in the wild state we learn that the prothallus 

 is developed in the damp late autumnal months, being perfectly 

 formed in November ; by January 3 or 4 fronds have been produced, 

 in April or May the growth is mature, and by August the plants 



G 2 



