F R TILE AND STERILE FRONDS LEAF-LIKE AND SIMILAR; 



SPORANGIA IN LINEAR OR OBLONG FRUIT - DOTS 



If Mr. Burr's kindness in sending me some fine 

 pressed specimens, and the illustrations I had seen 

 in various books, had not already made me familiar 

 with the general look of the plant, the long, un- 

 divided, tongue-like fronds, so different from one's 

 preconceived notion of a fern, would have been a 

 great surprise. Even now, although I have visited 

 many times its hidden retreats, and have noted with 

 delight every detail of its glossy, vigorous growth, 

 it seems to me always as rare and unusual as it did 

 the first day I found it. 



At Chittenango Falls the Hart's Tongue grows a 

 few yards from the base of bold, overhanging lime- 

 stone cliffs, the tops of which are fringed by pen- 

 dent roots of the red cedar. Nearly always it is 

 caught beneath moss-grown fragments of the fall- 

 en limestone, the bright-green, undulating, glossy 

 leaves either standing almost erect (curving out- 

 ward slightly above) or else falling over toward the 

 slope of the land so as to present a nearly pros- 

 trate appearance. At times these fronds are very 

 numerous, as many as fifty to a plant, forming great 

 clumps of foliage. Again we find a plant with only 

 half a dozen or even fewer green fronds. At matur- 

 ity the linear, bright-brown fruit-dots, a row on 

 either side the midrib, are conspicuous on the lower 

 surfaces of the fronds. 



This haunt of the Hart's Tongue is shaded by a 

 growth of tall basswoods and maples, of sturdy 

 oaks and hemlocks. The neighboring cliffs are 



draped with the slender fronds of the Bulblet Blad- 



152 



