A. CRISTATUMX MARGINALE AND A. SIMULATUM 79 
In due course of time Mr. Eaton went to California 
and Mr. Moulton to West Newbury and for a while I 
pursued my investigations alone. I soon, however, be- 
came acquainted with Dr. William Noyes, a former den- 
tal surgeon of Newburyport. I found that Mr. Noyes 
had for several years been interested in collecting and 
cultivating ferns. . . . I made many botanical trips with 
him, sometimes going fifteen or twenty miles from New- 
buryport and on one eccasion we made an excursion to 
Mi... Toby) os: 
One Bieta in August, 1891, accompanied by my 
nephew, I made a trip to the town of Merrimac, visiting 
a locality where I had been once before, one of my ob- 
jects being to obtain specimens of Asplenium thelyptero- 
ides. In lookimg over the ferns of the locality, of which 
there were quite a number of species, I came across a 
clump of what at first I took to be an odd looking form 
of A. cristatum. A. marginale was abundant on the hill- 
side and A. cristatum equally so in the low land between 
the hill and a neighboring river and I could but notice 
that this fern new to me grew at the very foot of the hill. 
I made further search and about fifty yards further on 
found another clump in the same position—that is, at the 
foot of the hill. A long-continued quest for the fern 
both on the hillside and in the low land proved to be 
fruitless. 
I collected specimens and returning home looked up 
A. cristatum, var. Clintonianum in the Manual and later 
in Eaton’s “Ferns of North America” (Boston Public 
Library), but I rejected the idea that it was a variety of 
A. cristatum, having already made up my mind that the 
new fern was a mix between A. cristatum and A. margin- 
I continued my investigations into the new fern. I 
made a good many botanical excursions the next summer, 
always having in mind the question of the relative abun- 
