ASPIDIUM NEVADENSE. 

 SIERRA NEVADA SHIELD-FERN. 



NATURAL ORDER, FILICES, 



ASPIDIUM Nevadense, D. C. Eaton.— Root stock rather short, creeping, densely covered with 

 the persistent bases of the former stalks ; fronds standing in a crown, one and a half to three 

 feet high, thin membranaceous, lanceolate in outline, pinnate ; pinnae sessile, linear-lance- 

 olate from a broad heavy base, deeply pinnatifid, the lower pairs distant and gradually 

 reduced to mere auricles; lobes crowded, oblong, entire or sparingly toothed, slightly 

 hairy on the veins beneath, and sprinkled with minute resinous particles; veins about seven 

 pairs to a lobe, simple or a few of the lower ones forked ; sori close to the margin ; indu- 

 sium minute reniform, furnished with a few dark colored marginal glands, and bearing 

 several long straight-jointed hairs on the upper surface. (D. C. Eaton's Ferns of Ahrth 

 America.') 



O the thoroughly informed and systematic botanist the 

 discovery of a new species is unwelcome. His herba- 

 rium has been arranged according to some favorite author's plan 

 or according to some approved system of his own, with neat 

 catalogues or numbered check lists to correspond, when newly 

 discovered species appear and his work has generally to be gone 

 over again. The young botanist, however, works with very 

 different feeling. The discovery of a new species is a great 

 delight to him, and much of the zest with which unexplored 

 regions are searched is in the hope that they will yield the 

 zealous naturalist something new. California and the regions 

 west of the Rocky Mountains have been particularly disastrous 

 to those botanists who comparatively few years ago had per- 

 fected their systematic arrangement. This territory had much 

 to do with the suspension of the Flora of North America com- 

 menced by our famous botanists in 1838, — but the hosts of new 



plants found since that time have added the collectors' laurels to 



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