Jtme 14, 1883] 



NA TURE 



147 



Now he has retired from his official position and come 

 'home to England, and the present work is the firstfruits 

 of his leisure. It contains in a handy form a full descrip- 

 tion of all the Indian genera and species, and is illustrated 

 by 300 uncoloured plates, reduced by means of photo- 

 graphy from those of his larger books, one full page plate, 

 with analytical details being given for each of the ninety- 

 ■eight genera he adopts, and the others of smaller size 

 interspersed amongst the letterpress. It is the first special 

 book of portable size and moderate price which has been 

 devoted to Indian ferns, and is in every way deserving of 

 the extensive circulation it is sure to obtain. 



India is one of the great fern centres of the world, and 

 it would not be an extravagant estimate to say that three- 

 quarters of the genera and one-quarter of the whole 

 number of ferns are known to grow within the area 

 covered by the present work, which is precisely the same 

 as that included in the " Flora of British India," by Sir 

 J. D. Hooker, of which three volumes are now com- 

 pleted. Europe is not a rich fern-continent, and most 

 of the European species extend their range to the 

 Western Himalayas. The Malay Islands are very rich 

 in ferns, and a large proportion of the Malayan species 

 extend to the Eastern Himalayas and the mountains of 

 the Peninsula and Ceylon ; and there are in India a con- 

 siderable number of endemic species. Col. Beddome 

 deserves full credit for not making or admitting species 

 upon insufficient grounds, and the number described in 

 the present work does not fall far short of six hundred, 

 all of which are Filices in the restricted sense, the Lyco- 

 podiacea; and Rhizocarps, which would carry up the 

 number a hundred more, not being included. 



Ferns are plants that suffer very little in the drying 

 process, and they are generally the first plants to be col- 

 lected when a new country is explored. But on the other 

 hand they are often far too large in size to be well repre- 

 sented in herbarium specimens, and often so extremely 

 variable in habit, that it is very easy to mistake a mere 

 casual variety for a genuine species. The first naming of 

 Indian ferns on a large scale was in the great herbarium 

 of Indian plants distributed by Wallich ; but he gave no 

 descriptions, simply names and numbers and localities, 

 and very often confused together two or three totally 

 different plants under the same number. In the five 

 ■volumes of his " Species Filicum," the species were 

 worked out and described by Sir William Hooker ; and 

 they were worked up again with abridged descriptions in 

 the "Synopsis Filicum," which it fell to my lot to con- 

 tinue after his death. In England the other botanists 

 who had specially attended to Indian ferns were Prof. 

 David Don and Messrs. John Smith and Thomas Moore. 

 So that till within a comparatively recent date no one 

 had written upon Indian ferns who had had any chance of 

 studying them in the field. But now the matter stands 

 upon an entirely different footing. In 1S80 Mr. C. B. 

 Clarke, who, after working for five years at Kew on the 

 * Flora Indica," has iust returned to India, and who had 

 paid special attention to ferns whilst collecting largely in 

 the Himalayas, published in the first volume of the new 

 botanical series of the Transactions of the Linnean Society, 

 a revision of the North Indian species, illustrated by 36 

 plates ; and now Col. Beddome, whose field experience 

 has been mainly gained amongst the mountains of the 



Peninsula, has worked up the whole series, with a full 

 opportunity of consulting the type-specimens of his pre- 

 decessors, deposited at Kew, the Linnean Society, and 

 the British Museum. 



As regards details of generic and specific limitation of 

 course no two authors who work independently but will 

 vary considerably. In the matter of fern-genera syste- 

 matists are divided into two parties — one regarding a 

 difference in veining as sufficient in itself to found a genus 

 upon, and the other maintaining substantially intact the 

 time-honoured genera of Swartz and Willdenow, which 

 are founded entirely on characters derived from fructifica- 

 tion. Of the first party among modern writers, Presl, 

 Fe"e, Smith, and Moore are the leading representatives ; 

 of the latter Hooker, Mettenius, and Eaton. Upon this 

 matter I differ from Col. Beddome, and the difference 

 amounts to wishing to use different names for perhaps 

 half the species included in his book. Of course what he 

 and Mr. Clarke have written about species-limitation and 

 the distribution of the species through different parts of 

 India will be a great accession to our knowledge; but I 

 am rather amused to see that out of the limited number 

 of new species which Mr. Clarke made he refuses to 

 admit at least half ; and that he totally rejects the only 

 material innovation that Mr. Clarke proposed on the 

 classification of our " Synopsis Filicum,'' the dividing of 

 our Asplcnium umbrosum, to establish out of part of it a 

 new section of Asplenium, to be called Pseudallantodia, 

 and characterised by a sausage-shaped involucre bursting 

 irregularly. The only points on which I feel inclined 

 to find fault with him are two. The first, that in his key 

 to the genera he puts Hymenophylleae under Poly- 

 podiaceae, without taking any notice of the difference in 

 the structure of the sporange, — but I see this is noticed in 

 the detailed diagnosis at p. 28. It seems to me that 

 Hymenophylleas have excellent claims to be regarded as 

 a distinct sub-order. The other point on which I wish to 

 enter a decided objection is to the plan which he follows, 

 or rather want of plan, in citing the authorities for the 

 specific names. When he places a species under a dif- 

 ferent genus to that under which it was classified by its 

 original describer, he moves backwards and forwards 

 without any uniformity between four different ways of 

 citing the authority. Sometimes he writes " Gleichenia 

 glattca (Hook.) "for a plant described by Thunberg as 

 Polypodium glaucum, and transferred by Hooker to 

 Gleichenia, which is the plan usually adopted by botanists. 

 But in many other cases he writes " Botrychium Lunaria 

 (Linn, under Osmunda)'' when the species was described 

 by Linnaeus as an Osmunda and transferred by Swartz to 

 Botrychium ; or " Cyrtomium falcatitm (Sw.) " when 

 Swartz called the plant Aspidium Jalcatum and Presl 

 transferred it to Cyrtomium ; or even " Lastrca tkely- 

 pteris (Desv.)" for a plant published first by Linnaeus as 

 a Polypodium, transferred by Swartz to Aspidium, by 

 Desvaux to Nephrodium, and Presl to Lastrea. And the 

 same uncertainty vitiates his citations of books at the end 

 of his descriptions. His citations refer to the plant, but 

 according to the accepted usage amongst botanists they 

 will be taken, and very often wrongly taken, as referring 

 to the binomial name as used, so that if any one copies 

 synonymy from the book without checking it oft" he will 

 often find it leads him astray. J. G. Baker 



