595 



Within a year we may have speculators quoting the * Vegetable 

 Kingdom ' in favour of some wild hypothesis, and repeating to the 

 world these ludicrously inaccurate summaries, as a proof that the 

 number of natural genera is rapidly advancing towards that of 

 species. O. P. 



Note on Trichomanes speciosum. 



Mr. William Andrews, Secretary to the Dublin Natural History 

 Society, read a paper upon the genera Trichomanes and Hyme- 

 nophyllum. His remarks were chiefly directed to the species of 

 Trichomanes discovered by him in September, 1842, in the western 

 part of the county of Kerry, and which presented a variety of growth 

 and state of fructification so much more developed and characteristic 

 of the genus of that beautiful fern, than had hitherto been met with in 

 Ireland, that it determined him to examine its affinities with some of 

 the exotic ferns, particularly with those of the West India islands. 



The Trichomanes was first discovered in Britain, by Dr. Richard- 

 son, at Belbank, near Bingley, Yorkshire, a wretched specimen of 

 which is in the Banksian Herbarium, now in the British Museum : a 

 figure of a barren frond is given by Dillenius in Raii Syn. p. 127, t, 3. 

 This specimen, however, not having been found in fructification, was 

 supposed to be identical with the Filix (Trichomanes) pyxidifera of 

 Plumier, and was described as such by Hudson, in his Flora Anglica, 

 p. 461 : and this name it retained until its discovery, in the month of 

 October, 1804, at Turk Waterfall, near Killarney, by Mr. Mackay 

 curator of the botanic garden at Trinity College. Mr. Mackay ob- 

 taining this beautiful fern in fructification, forwarded specimens to Sir 

 James Edward Smith, who at once decided its distinctness from 

 Plumier's plant and considered it to be a new species, which he nam- 

 ed and figured in ' English Botany ' as Hymenophyllura alatum, from 

 its winged stipe. The distinguished Robert Brown, the first physio- 

 logical botanist of the day, corrected this specific appellation to that 

 of brevisetum (Br. in Hort. Kew. ed. 2, 5, p. 529), from the short and 

 barely exserted state of the receptacles that the Killarney plants ge- 

 nerally presented. Mr. E. Newman, who has devoted so much atten- 

 tion to the specific characteristics of the British ferns, formed the 

 first view, that the Killarney species perfectly agreed with Willde- 

 now's description (Sp. Plant, v. p. 514) of the speciosum of Teneriffe, 

 and published it as such, in his first edition of the ' History of British 



