TREE-FERNS. 353 



folia, a Fern of very different aspect, is also of low 

 altitude, rarely exceeding the height of man: its 

 broad, pointed pinnae, cut into knife-like teeth, give 

 it a peculiarly noble appearance. H. howida, how- 

 ever, attains a really arboreal height ; a species 

 whose stem and mid-ribs bristle with sharp spines, 

 and whose young leaves have a remarkable appear- 

 ance, from being clothed with a sort of gray wool on 

 their first unfolding. 



Cyatliea arborea is a species of peculiar elegance, 

 growing in more open spots, in small groups and 

 groves. The slender stems, each marked with its 

 oval scale-like scars, and throwing out from its sum- 

 mit its swelling cluster of leaf-bases, so compact and 

 so regular as to look like the elegantly-fluted knob of 

 some cast-iron pillar, again constricted before they 

 spread abroad in a wide umbrella of finely cut foliage, 

 have an imposing effect, surrounded by the moss- 

 grown trunks, shaggy with gorgeous parasites, of tall 

 trees that tower up and interweave their branches far 

 overhead, shutting out the sun, and almost the light. 



The Alsophilce, again, are Tree-ferns of lowlier 

 elevation. A . ferox, rightly named, since it is most 

 ferociously armed with long, rigid thorns, rears a 

 stem three or four yards high, from the midst of rank 

 herbage. Its fronds are generally like those of our 

 own male fern, but exaggerated: the formidable 

 prickles, however, that stand up from the knobbed 

 bases of the fronds, which swell out around the sum- 

 mit of the trunk, like the bulging 'branches of a 



