BRITTLE BLADDER FERN 99 



ranked, under the general name of Aspidice. There 

 are three British species of Bladder Ferns : the Brittle 

 or Fragile Cystoperis fragilis, the Alpine C. regia, 

 and the Mountain G. montana but only the first is 

 really authenticated as belonging to the Lake Country, 

 no claim being made for O. montana, and the likelihood 

 of C. regia depending only on the following paragraph 

 in Moore's last edition : " We have not seen a native 

 mountain specimen of C. regia unless it be one from 

 Saddleback (Blencathra), in Cumberland, gathered 

 many years since by Mr. S. F. Gray." There appears 

 indeed to be only one authenticated habitat of the 

 plant in England : that at Low Leyton, in Essex. 



The Brittle Bladder Fern is of a very delicate and 

 grassy appearance, the root-stems spreading under 

 favourable circumstances into large patches of nume- 

 rous crowns, each of which throws up a tuft of several 

 fronds, from six inches to sometimes a foot in height. 

 The stipes, erect, and rather more than a third of the 

 length of the frond, is brittle, dark, shining, with a few 

 small scales at the base. The fronds are lanceolate, 

 bipinnate ; the pinnae lanceolate ; the pinnules ovate- 

 acute, cut more or less deeply on the margin, the lobes 

 furnished with a few pointed teeth. In some vigour- 

 ous plants the pinnules are so very deeply cut as to 

 become pinnatifid, almost pinnate, the lobes themselves 

 then resembling the smaller pinnules nearer the apex 

 of the pinnae and frond. The venation, from the deli- 

 cacy of the frond, is very readily seen. In the ordi- 

 narily-sized pinnules there is a somewhat twisty mid- 

 vein, giving off a side branch or vein to each of the 



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