ASPIDIUM CRISTATUM. 

 CRESTED SHIELD-FERN. 



NATURAL ORDER, FILICES. 



ASPIDIUM CRISTATUM, Swartz.— Frond linear-oblong or lanceolate in outline, one to two feet 

 long; pinnse short, two to three inches long, triangular-oblong, or the lowest nearly 

 triangular-ovate, from a somewhat heart-shaped base, acute, deeply pinnatifid ; the divisions 

 (six to ten p.irs) oblong, very obtuse, finely serrate or cut-toothed, the lowest pinnatifid- 

 lobed ; fruit dots as near the mid-vein as the margin ; indusium round-reniform, the sinus 

 mostly shallow, smooth and naked. Stipes and the stout creeping root-stock bearing broad 

 and deciduous chaffy scales. (Gray's Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States. 

 See also Wood's Class- Book of Botany, and Williamson's Ferns of Kentucky.) 



|hERE are few pleasures more agreeable to the botanist 

 than the discovery of a new species, or of a new location 

 for an old one. Botanical students are now so abundant that 

 few new plants are to be found in the older setded porUons of 

 our country ; but new locations for the rarer species are frequendy 

 discovered, and these occasionally in places wholly unexpected. 

 In Philadelphia, now numbering a population of nearly a million, 

 there are hundreds of botanists who are continually collecting the 

 plants growing within ten or fifteen miles about it; but it is 

 nowhere on record that any one has found within this limit the 

 pretty fern we now describe. The earlier and famous botanists 

 made special explorations of this district, and one of them, Dr. 

 W. C. P. Barton, in 1818, published a " Compendium Florae Phil- 

 adelphicae," or a description of the indigenous and naturalized 

 plants found within a circuit often miles round Philadelphia; 

 but there is no note of any one having found this species within 

 this limit. It was therefore a great satisfaction to the brother of 

 the writer of this, Mr. Joseph Meehan, when he found a few 



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