194 ASPLENIUM PINNATIFIDUM. PINNATIFID SPLEEN-WORT. 



small straight lines is in excellent contrast with the green and 

 curved outline of the divisions of the frond. Of course this effect 

 is heightened by the warm color of the withering fronds, but the 

 beauty of the plant is entided to full credit for this item, for the 

 artist found them there. Further it may be said that the artistic 

 arrangement of the fronds lends the plant much beauty. The 

 curving of the left-hand lower frond with the brown-dotted 

 under-surface of die upper one, nicely balances the upper-curved 

 and brown under one on the right side, and makes a variation in 

 harmony very pleasant to enjoy. But even here it is only be- 

 cause the artist had what nature afforded him. It is the artist's 

 fidelity to nature which makes the picture beautiful. The fronds 

 would furnish valuable material to designers in ornamental work. 

 The lovers of plant-life, as well as lovers of mere beauty, will 

 find much to interest them in this little fern. The first leaves of 

 the spring are very small, and as they appear the last season's 

 fronds begin to die. The earliest leaves are but slighdy lobed, 

 merely crenate, as the text-books would say. These nearly en- 

 tire leaves are barren, but other small fronds soon appear, and 

 more deeply cleft, and others successively enlarge till fronds four 

 or five inches in length are formed. The special interest in this 

 fern is that no sooner do the fronds become deeply lobed but the 

 fruit dots appear, no matter how small or how early produced in 

 the season these fronds may be. As we see in our plate a small 

 frond, not one inch in length, is yet covered by fruit dots. Prob- 

 ably no fern known is so enormously productive of spore cases 

 as this species. Now all these points happen to be in striking 

 contrast with another fern with which it was in its early history 

 associated — the Camptosorzis rhizophylhis. Of this one Michaux 

 s^ys, f}'2ictiJicatio7ic inordmate sparsis ; that is to say, fruit un- 

 usually scarce. And this scarcity of fructification is indeed a well- 

 known character of this, the Walking Fern. Then as regards the 

 lobing, the Walking Fern in its earlier stages has very entire fronds, 

 but as the successive growths increase in size, auricles at the 

 base, and other tendencies to division appear, and it is only as 



