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resented by many specimens of the sword-fern, Nephrolepis, 
avallia, many forms of which make desirable basket-plants, 
Microlepia, Odontosoria and Dennstaedtia, these terminating the 
sequence. Among the sword-ferns here will be found several 
horticultural derivatives from the common Nephrolepis exaltata, 
widely distributed in tropical America. These plants form an 
interesting study in variation induced largely by cultivation. 
There are many genera and species represented in this collec- 
tion, and the arrangement in botanical sequence permits of a com- 
parative study of them, a method by which the differences and 
resemblances can best be studied, and thus an intimate knowledge 
of their classification obtained. 
Georcz V. NasH. 
THE FLOWERS AND FRUIT OF THE TURTLE-GRASS. 
One of the most interesting plants recently collected by Mr. 
Percy Wilson, administrative assistant at the New York Botanical 
Garden, on his trip to the Bahamas, was the turtle-grass, Tha- 
lassia testudinum, in flowers and young fruit. The plant was first 
discovered by Patrick Browne and described by him in 1756 in 
“ 
a 
oO 
small grassy leaf’d Alga, or Turtle-grass.” He adds: “This 
plant grows frequently in the shallow sandy bays of Jamaica; 
and is the most common food of the manatee, the turtle, and the 
trunc-fish; as well as many other smaller marine animals.” It 
was also described by Sloane in his Natural History of Jamaica, 
but there confused with an alga described and figured by L’Obel 
and Caspar Bauhin. 
The first ear are of it as a flowering plant we find in 
Konig & Sims’ Annals of ae in 1806, under the name of 
Thalassia eae Konig had found specimens of this plant 
in Banks’ herbarium under Solander’s manuscript name Thalassia, 
which he adopted. Konig described, however, only the staminate 
(male) flowers. As far as the writer can find, there has never 
been published any description of the pistillate (female) flowers 
