350 FERNS. 



Among the climbers we have yet another, and a 

 quite diverse, type of Ferns, the genus Davallia, noted 

 for their large, broadly-triangular, minutely-divided 

 fronds, and for the sori being placed, like very minute 

 black pin-heads, at the tips of the lacerations. D. 

 elegans runs up tree-trunks as well as over rocks, in 

 these humid mountain woods ; its stout, pale-brown, 

 woolly root-stock, conspicuous as it winds, connecting 

 the somewhat remote but magnificent fronds, which 

 are two feet in length, and almost as much in width. 

 It is a species of great elegance and noble beauty. 



In the very heart of the tangled thickets, where the 

 earth is soft, and black, and spongy, where a carpet 

 of lovely green Selaginella is spread in great sheets 

 over the roughnesses of uncouth stones and old decay- 

 ing logs, and where the light of heaven finds its way 

 eoftened and subdued through myriads of twinkling 

 green leaves far overhead, many kinds of Ferns delight 

 to grow and flourish, as the vivid hue and freshness of 

 their tender fronds reveal. Here we may find Dipla- 

 zium striatum, an. elegant array of large but exqui- 

 sitely delicate pointed leaves, spreading from the 

 summit of a slender stem, a foot high, a Tree-fern 

 in miniature. Or we might suddenly break upon the 

 magnificent Hemidictyon marginatum, with its broad, 

 translucent pinnte permeated by a charming network 

 of veinlets towards their outer edges, and marked by 

 strong oblique lines of brown sori, one of the noblest 

 of non-arborescent Ferns, sometimes shadowing an area 

 of five-and-twenty feet. Or we might meet with an- 



