UNDERWOOD: AMERICAN FERNS 255 
Gleichenia rigida Bommer & Christ. Bull. Soc. Bot. Belg. 3h: 174. 
1869. Not Gleichenia rigida J. Sm. 
Type tocaity: Brazil, Maximilian Prinz Neuwied. 
DistrisutTion: Lower elevations up to 800 m. alt., Porto 
Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, and southward from Colombia along the 
Andes to Peru and Brazil. 
ILLustraTion: Mart. Icon. Crypt. Bras. p/. 60. f. r. 
This is the American representative of a rather complicated 
group of plants that have been unceremoniously massed under 
the name of Gleichenia dichotoma. This last species was described 
and figured from Japan by Thunberg as Polypodium dichotomum 
and may be distinct from the earlier Malayan representative of the 
group described by Burmann as Polypodium lineare. In any case 
the Malayan representative will bear the name Dicranopteris linearis 
(Burm.) as noted above. The fibro-vascular bundles of the last- 
named species are wiry and elastic and are used by the Malayans ~ 
for weaving hats or hat frames and other articles. The Javan 
Species is much larger than its low American representative and 
this accounts in part for the confusion which has placed several 
Old World species ranging from Hawaii and Japan to Java, Nepal, 
Madagascar and Fernando Po in one species, when there are cer- 
tainly several as indicated by their mummied fragments preserved 
in European herbaria. 
8. Dicranopteris fulva (Desv.). , 
Mertensia fulva Desv. Ann. Soc. Linn. Paris 6: 200. 1827. 
This commonest species of the island of Jamaica has been in 
recent years strangely confused with the Mertensia pubescens of 
Willdenow, which was originally described from South America. 
It was characterized in 182 7 by Desvaux in the following terms 
Which appear unmistakable : 
“Stipite et rachi dichotomo glabris ; frondibus pinnatis ; pinnis per dichotomiam 
decurrentibus, pectinato-pinnatifidis : pinnulis linearibus, elongatis, subobtusis, air 
fulvo-tomentosis ; sporangiis subquaternatis. Habitat in montibus ceruleis Jamaicae. 
The Hookerian school, Grisebach, and Jenman all confused 
this Species with Mertensia pubescens, notwithstanding the fact 
that Sturm as early as 1859 had definitely delimited that much 
smaller South American species which Willdenow himself had 
