The genus Stenochlaena 



Lucien Marcus Underwood 





In no portion of Synopsis Filicum does the lack of coordination 

 of the work of other authors manifest itself more strikingly than at 

 page 412 under Acrostic hum sorbifolium, where the elaborate work 

 of Fee, which had appeared twenty-two years previously, is made 

 to pass for naught, and his seventeen species of Lomariopsis are 



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reduced to synonymy. While the elder Hooker was writing the 

 Species Filicum, of which the Synopsis is a revised and abbreviated 

 digest, Kunze and, later, Mettenius, were describing ferns indepen- 

 dently at Leipzig, as was also Presl at Prague, and Fee at Stras- 

 burg. The work at each of these centers appears to have gone 

 on in practical independence and without much comparison or 

 coordination. Such species as happened to come to Kew appear 

 to have been reviewed, and the others were often reduced to syn- 

 onymy with no specimen at hand. Some were never mentioned. 

 The visitation of other centers seems rarely if ever to have been 

 practiced. Presl had no successor to his studies and his still un- 

 mounted fern collection exists to-day at Prague, apparently never 

 visited by modern European fern students or monographers. At 

 Berlin, Kuhn was the lineal successor of Mettenius, as Fournier at 

 Paris was the successor of Fee. At Berlin, in addition to the col- 

 lection of Willdenow, most of the types of Kaulfuss, Kunze, 

 Klotzsch, Mettenius and Kuhn may be seen, and at Paris most of 

 those of Lamarck, Bory, Desvaux, Fee and Fournier are at the 

 museum of the Jardin des Plantes, but neither Hooker nor his 

 successors at Kew consulted them, and to this present year of 

 grace, continental European fern students have never taken the 

 trouble to coordinate them with the Kew collection, but have con- 

 tinued to work on in the same old independent ways. 



In attempting to elucidate the American species of Stenochlaena, 

 the fact that Hooker had attributed one of our West Indian spe- 

 cies to nearly all parts of the tropical world * made it necessary to 



^ - ■ ■„ ■■■ _ 1 _ 



*" West Indies to Peru and South Brazil; Fiji, Samoa, New Caledonia, Philippines, 

 Malaccas, Cochin China, Seychelles, Mascaren Isles, Angola, Guinea Coast/ 7 — Syn. 



Fil. 412. 



35 



