738 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XIV, 



The above description has been written by me from a large series of speci- 

 mens. I first gathered this fern at Naini Talin 1861, and again at Simla in 

 1871. I was very familiar with it ac Mussooree from 1880 to 1896, where it 

 is one of the commonest ferns in and near forest, on the north side of the ridge. 

 On diy ground it is small and poor, and like Clarke's type of N. F.-mas, var. 

 2, nornmlis ; but in rich moist soil, in open shade, it developes into a large hand- 

 some plant, with a number of fronds growing up simultaneously from the apex 

 of a suberect or decumbent stout caudex, but not shuttlecock-wise from an erect 

 oaudex, like the fronds of N. F.-mas. Generdlly the four, always three, 

 lowest pau's of pinnse are barren, and not uncommonly five pairs. This may be 

 taken as a character of the species. The sori are small, but the involucres 

 when young are twice as large as the sori, shrivelling up when they ripen. 

 The pinnai are all distant, increasingly so downwards to 3 — 3-^- in. apart in 

 large fronds. The stipes is generally long. Before I saw this fully-developed 

 rtate of the plant I thought the Mussooree fern must be Clarke's normalis. I 

 cbjected to the species being put under F.-mas^ and when, later, I received 

 Assam specimens from Mr. Clarke, I identified them with the small iorm of the 

 Mussooree fern. When I went to England in 1888, and studied at Kew, 1 

 noted — " No specimon that I have, or have seen, marked var. normalis by 

 Mr. Clarke is at all like N. Filix-mas, either in stipe, shape of fiond, cutting, 

 or sori." I classified on paper all the specimens like normalis^ or like the 

 Mussooree larger fern, into groups : — I. Old specimens, identical with 

 Clarke's own, found freely scattered through bundles marked as containing not 

 only N. F-mas^^ndi varieties of it, but N. rigidmn, Desv.,and these Mr. Clarke 

 had apparently not identified as his normalis. The earliest collected of 

 these is, I think, a frond collected by Jacquemont at Mussooree, No. 592, and 

 it had been marked N. remotum by Mr, Clarke. Another, from Afghanistan, 

 Griffith, Mr. Clarke bad marked N. ngidum, Desv. Two or three sheets, of 

 Dr. Bacon's collecting, have tickets — " Mussooree, abundant," and — " N.-West 

 India, Mr. Edgeworth." There are about a dozen sheets of these old specimens, 

 collected from Kashmir to Kumaun, but all unnxkAakably N. odonioloma, 

 Moore. 



Group II. comprises seven sheets of Mr. Clarke's own collecting in Kashmir 

 and at Dalhousie in the Chamba State, marked rigidum or remotum. A wrapper 

 marked by him ' Ind. Or. rigidum,^ contained either N. marginatum, Wall., or 

 very large and compound specimens of the Mussooree normalis, collected by 

 Jacquemont, Straohey and Winterbottom, Hook, fil, et Thorns, and Edge- 

 woith. None of these seemed to me in the least like the European rigidum or 

 remotum. Some loose sheets had mostly been referred to rigidum, though they 

 were not in a rigidum wrapper. I thought them not even like that species. 

 Many were named pallidum by the collectors, which name well indicates their 



