72 AMERICAN FERN JOURNAL 
forest I found the surface to be rugged beyond anything I ever 
saw in mountain regions, being a succession of cliffs, pits, chasms 
and rocks of all sizes and forms, the whole being covered with 
and I was then making 125 specimens of a kind. What gave me 
the most trouble, as well as pleasure, was the splendid Aspidium 
trifoliatum, then for the first time found in the United States. 
“The fern hammock, as I call it (the word hammock being a 
southern substitute for forest, erroneously compounded with hum- 
The ferns most abundant are Asplenium myriophyllum, A. 
firmum and A. parvulum, Pteris cretica, Adiantum tenerum, Aspidium 
patens and A. trifoliatum. On my first visit, when I struck another 
from falling backward from a ledge of rock over a sharp rock below. 
A day or two later a prominent citizen while hunting in the same 
hammock had his back broken and died after thirty-six hours of 
intense suffering. . . , 
“Of the exquisite Asplenium myriophyllum there are two marked 
forms in this locality, and I have given both of them wide distribu- 
tion. It seems that they differ only in size, but there is no apparent 
reason why one grows so much larger than the other.” 
In 1906 Prof. Underwood (Bull. Torrey Club 33: 193- 
195) pointed out that these two supposed forms of 
Asplenium myriophyllum were specifically distinct from 
that West Indian Species and from each other, and 
gave them new names. He also revised the nomen- 
clature of one or two of the other ferns from the same 
place. 
About 1908 Mrs, Mary A. Noble, an enthusiastic 
fern student living at Inverness, the county-seat of 
Citrus County, heard of this fern locality independently, 
and visited it, as well as a somewhat similar place a 
