332 FERNS. 



heads from the damp soil ; the adolescents are expand- 

 ing their hundred arms ; the mature are displaying 

 their curious and beautiful fructification, or forming 

 young offspring-plants to dangle in the air at their 

 tips, so that the pleased culturist has ever something 

 to explore, something to admire. 



To see our native species to advantage, let a stran- 

 ger of refined taste roam amidst the tall-hedged lanes 

 and "ferny combes" of sweet Devon, in whose mild 

 and moist climate somewhat of the balmy breath of 

 the tropics is inhaled, brought to her shores by the 

 impinging waves of the mighty Gulf-stream. Here 

 the Ferns attain a magnificence of dimensions and a 

 permanence of freshness seen in scarcely any other 

 district of the land. I have in my eye at this moment 

 a lane, one side of which is formed by a bank very 

 nearly perpendicular, and about fifteen feet high ; the 

 whole face of this steep is densely clothed with the 

 Hart's-tongue, whose glossy green fronds, two feet in 

 length and four inches in breadth, spring out in the 

 most beautiful arches from the top to the bottom, 

 many of them strangely crisped and curled, and many 

 displaying that tendency to multiplied fission which 

 forms so interesting a feature in this species, wherever 

 it is found in luxuriance. Not far off is an old 

 wall, the upper half of which is one unbroken sheet of 

 Trichomanes Spleenwort, intermingled with Ceterach 

 and Wallrue, the tufts springing out of the old decayed 

 mortar so close together as to make a continuous 

 shaggy surface of the elegantly fringed fronds. This 



