FERN FREAKS. 85 
giving anyone any information if he could possibly help it; and 
who, in order to avoid doing so, adopted the somewhat perplex- 
ing habit of turning himself into various forms of birds, beasts, 
and fishes, and all manner of other objects, animate and inani- 
mate.. The name of this very slippery sea-god has been already 
transferred to a tribe of plants, the Order Proteacee, because 
though they agree in essential particulars, they are externally so 
very unlike each other, that, as Dr. Lindley observed, ‘‘ the 
diversity of appearance presented by the various genera is such 
as would be hard to parallel in the same Natural Order.” But I 
am not at all sure if the tribe of Ferns does not merit the title of 
Protean quite as much as the Proteacee themselves ; for it is a 
very large order, and among its two thousand and more species 
that are already discovered and named, we find a very great va- 
riety of form and considerable difference in habit of growth. 
There is an extraordinary diversity in the form of the fronds— 
some simple in outline, some deeply cut, and varying in every 
possible degree betwen linear and round, heartshaped or triangu- 
lar. We have only to look at the few species that grow in our 
own country, and to contrast such ferns as the Hart’s-tongue, 
the Parsley Fern and the Osmunda to see what a pleasing variety 
there is; but in the numerous foreign species this diversity is 
much more apparent; and we have them also mimicking the leaves 
of other plants—so that one has to look at them closely and 
study their structure before one can believe they are ferns at all. 
Then they differ so much in size. Who, that has climbed the 
passes of our own lake mountains and has seen the lovely little 
Parsley Fern peeping out from under huge stones, or the delicate 
Hymenophyllum growing in mossy cushions where the water 
trickles from the crevices of rocks, would think that these simple 
little plants claimed for their first cousins the magnificent palm- 
like Tree Ferns of tropical countries? Not many weeks ago I 
stood under the shade of one of these tree ferns in a quite romantic 
fern house at Tatton, the Cheshire residence of Lord Egerton. 
It was a noble specimen, with a stem some ten or twelve feet 
high, and a foot or more in diameter, and it was crowned with 
a plume of fronds so large that, though the building was certainly 
