NOVEMBER. 527 



Valley, but very inferior in size, owing to the destructiveness of men ; and 

 also as high as 50° N. latitude, whence an officer of the French navy has 

 brought cones identical with those from California. — [Card. Chron., \856, 

 p. G43.) 



Cdltivatign of Ferns by Seeds. — It is well kuDwn that Ferns are 

 naturally propagated by the small brown bodies formed on the under side 

 of their leaves and which we shall, at the risk of being taken to task by our 

 botanical friends, call seeds. These seeds are not, however, what meets 

 the naked eye when the under side of a Fern leaf is examined. The parts 

 which are so easily seen by the naked eye are the seed vessels; Fern seeds 

 are little angular bodies too minute to be visible, and are expelled by the 

 spontaneous bursting of the seed-vessels, which then remain empty behind. 

 It may therefore and often no doubt does happen that when the brown dust 

 from the back of a Fern leaf is sown, it has no seeds among it, but consists 

 entirely of fragments of the broken seed-vessels. In this way we may ex- 

 plain the general want of success that attends the aitempts of those who 

 endeavor to raise Ferns from dried specimens gathered in foreign coun- 

 tries. Such specimens generally have shed all their seed before they reach 

 Europe. 



To obviate this difficulty Mr. Saunders requested Mr. Wallace, the dis- 

 tinguished naturalist then at Singapore, to adopt the following method : A 

 little moderately damp earth being spread flat, the under side of a fresh 

 ripe Fern leaf was pressed upon the earth, so as to detach the seeds and 

 their seed-vessels. The earth was then placed in a vial, corked up and 

 sent to England. The vial was six months on the voyage home ; upon its 

 arrival in mid-winter its contents were sown in a shady dampi hothouse. In 

 a short time Fern plants sprang up " as thickly as mustard and cress," 

 and the plants are now after six or seven months from 4 to 5 inches high. 



The process thus described is attended by the very important advantages 

 of securing perfectly fresh seed, and of placing it during its passage home 

 in a situation just as damp as is necessary to maintain vitality unimpaired. 

 The only precautions needed are to be certain that the seed is ripe when 

 pressed upon the earth, to take care that the latter is merely damp, not wet, 

 when corked up, and to keep the vial in the dark. In this way all the 

 Ferns of the tropics may now be procured with the greatest facility. 



Some, indeed, may think that we previously knew all about Fern-raising, 

 and that herbaria need only be ransacked to secure supplies of seeds. 

 Never was a mistake greater. We are assured, indeed, that Willdenow 

 raised various kinds of Ferns in Berlin from seeds thus procured, and that 

 two plants of Gymnogramma calomelanos were once obtained in the garden 

 at Liverpool from seeds 50 years old taken out of the herbarium of Forster. 

 Let us frankly own that we read these stories with incredulity ; to our 

 mind such so-called facts are open to great suspicion. Not that we pre- 

 sume to question the good faith of those who are said to have succeeded in 

 the operation ; quite the contrary ; Willdenow, of Berlin, and Shepherd, of 



