Impressions of the Ferns of Porto Rico 
AGNES CHASE 
On a first visit to the West Indies a botanist of the 
northern United States would be most impressed, I 
think, by the palms and ferns. In the fall of 1913 the 
writer spent about two months in Porto Rico studying 
and collecting the grasses of the island. The ferny by- 
products of this trip have proved to be of some inter- 
est. 
Save a narrow strip along most of the coast Porto 
Rico is all hills and hollows. Except along the dry 
south coast, ferns are in evidence almost everywhere 
from sea level to the highest summits, becoming more 
plentiful the greater the altitude. My first day in the 
highlands was October 23 at Maricao, which we reached 
about half-past seven, after two hours’ ride up the 
winding road through the cool morning mists, past 
coffee and banana groves, the roadside banks in places 
completely covered with ferns. After café at the fonda 
we set out, following up the Rio Maricao, scrambling 
over the rocks and in and out of the water most of the 
way. Maricao is 1500 feet high and we ascended some 
five hundred feet only in the five or six miles we made 
up river. The beauty of that rocky stream of clear 
rushing water, its banks hung with strange trees and 
shrubs and gorgeous flowers, with ferns everywhere 
they could find a foothold, on rocks, on the trunks and 
branches of trees, was intoxicating. I met my first tree 
ferns here. One, some 25 feet high, a species of Also- 
phila, was collected in fruit. It has fronds six or eight 
feet long, the stout woody stipes beset with spines like 
a blackberry cane. On its trunk were growing Poly- 
podium asplenifolium L., its long narrow fronds droop- 
ing over on their slender fuzzy stipes, and Trichomanes 
