ROYAL FERN. 93 



collector have in too many instances succeeded in utterly ex- 

 terminating it. This is, of course, particularly the case within 

 a ten-mile radius of any large town, and wherever one of the 

 well-beaten tourist tracks runs close to one of its stations. We 

 have personal knowledge of a case where a well-to-do woman, 

 who was neither a dealer nor a collector, made several ex- 

 cursions in a carriage and pair to a bog where the Royal Fern 

 grew, and would not rest until she and her maid had removed 

 every plant to her own home, because she knew the fern to be 

 rare in the district. That was the sole point that appealed to 

 her : the Royal Fern was rare. Thereafter, to her wonted boast 

 of relationship to an archbishop, she was able to add a 

 claim to social distinction on the ground that she possessed all 

 the Royal Ferns that grew in that section of the county ! Our 

 attempt to make her ashamed by a little sarcasm was thrown 

 away. We might as well have sought to stir up a crocodile by 

 pelting it with paper confetti. Now that the Royal Ferns of 

 Tregear are no more, the Cornwall County Council have made 

 by-laws prohibiting such spoliation in future. But the making 

 of such by-laws is one thing ; enforcing them in out-of-the-way 

 places is another matter. 



The name Osmunda has been variously derived by the 

 philologists, but the most reasonable of these is that it is from 

 Osmunder, one of the names of the Scandinavian god Thor. 

 Regalis is the Latin for royal. The English names are 

 numerous, and some of them that are merely book names are 

 of considerable age, for they were used by Lyte (1578), Gerarde 

 (1597), Parkinson (1629), and other old writers. Among these 

 names is Herb Christopher and St. Christopher's Herb, used 

 by Lyte and Parkinson, and no doubt suggested by the fern 

 growing along river-sides, such as Christopher was in the habit 

 of frequenting when he acted as a ferry. For similar reasons 

 Gerarde called it Water Fern, and an old Saxon name for it 

 was Ditch-fern. In the shorter form of Osmund the later 



