256 SOME REMARKS ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF FERNS. 
even an uninitiated person must recognize the fact. This author has 
addressed to those who differ from him the singular and unanswerable 
subjective criticism that ** peut-être ont-ils résisté, sans le savoir, à leurs 
propres convictions ;"—relying, apparently, overmuch on the strength 
of his own. Though candidly acknowledging that analytic pteridolo- 
gists* have conscientiously worked out their views with great skill, 
and, granting their premisses, with considerable success, and fully ad- 
mitting the obligations botanists are under to Messrs. Smith, Fée, and 
Moore, who have done very much to increase our knowledge; the 
real question at issue is the relative worth of the principles involved. 
I must frankly confess that my own experience convinces me that 
synthetic notions of genera are the most natural; and I look with the 
greatest confidence to Professor Mettenius, unquestionably the most 
philosophical and thorough of living pteridographers, and the head of 
the synthetic school, who I believe proposes to study and examine all 
the genera of Ferns in the same manner as he has treated Polypodium, 
Cheilanthes, Aspidium, etc.,to clear up many of the doubts and difficulties 
which at present beset us. Presl, in his ‘ Tentamen Pteridographiz,’ 
while expounding much more moderate analytic views than in his sub- 
ent writings, or than those put forward by the later adherents of 
the “jeune école," seems also to me to have formed much more na- 
tural groups; though I believe the reliance he placed, even in his first 
work, on venation, which was somewhat plausibly but sophistically de- 
fended in an able preface, was very excessive when tested by experience. 
It must, however, be remembered, in justice to Presl, that in his pre- 
face he explicitly observes :—“ In Filicaceis genera valorem alium et 
quidem minorem habent ac genera plantarum phanerogamarum ; con- 
sideranda sunt nempe priora tanquam subgenera, si eodem mensuran- 
tur pondere ac genera Phanerogamarum;" so that there was in effect 
even more difference between him and his successors than is usually 
believed. It is scarcely necessary, I imagine, to insist that, to employ 
the term genus in different divisions of the vegetable kingdom with 
varying siguification, is at once unphilosophical, unnecessary, and in- 
convenient, 
So strongly does all evidence seem to me to point to the reduction 
* I except the late Prof. Link, —if, indeed, he should be included in 
om Ve views (as given in Filicum Sp. Hort. reg. Ber jt eee Bes 
too loose, crude, and unsystematized, to deserve much noti 
