86 
one sixth of our present fern collection. This amount will be 
largely reduced when the duplicates are removed, however, for 
in some cases there are as many as twelve sheets of one species, 
from the same locality. The collection is accessible for com- 
parison, with the genera alphabetically arranged, and will not be 
incorporated with our collections until Professor Underwood 
returns from the West Indies, when he will find it very valuable 
in determining the large collections of ferns which he is gathering 
in Jamaica, and elsewhere. 
George Samuel Jenman was born in England on August 24, 
1845, and died at Georgetown, British Guiana, on February 28, 
1902. He spent several years at Kew Gardens in training as a 
gardener and showed such marked ability that in 1873 he was 
appointed to the charge of the Botanic Gardens at Castleton, 
Jamaica, where he served six years. During this period he not 
only became known through his studies on the sugar-cane, and 
experiments on its seedlings, but he also found time to make ex- 
tensive collections of the flowering plants and ferns, sending many 
new and interesting species to specialists elsewhere, and collect- 
ing one of the largest herbaria of Jamaica ferns that has ever 
been gathered together. Meanwhile he was publishing descrip- 
,tions in various journals principally in the Journal of Botany, the 
Gardener's Chronicle, and the Bulletins of the Botanical Gardens 
of Jamaica. It was at this time that he prepared his “‘ Hand List 
of the Jamaica Ferns and their allies” published in 1881. In 
1879 he was called to organize a Botanical Station in British 
Guiana, and remained there until his death, building out of the 
wilderness one of the best of the Tropical Botanical Gardens- 
He thus acquired a wide and varied experience in tropical agri- 
culture, and at the same time continued his botanical studies, pub- 
lishing a ‘‘ Synoptical List of the Ferns of Jamaica,” 1870-1899, 
of five hundred species, and later began a “ List of the Ferns 
of the West Indies and British Guiana,’ which was not com- 
pleted at the time of his death. Mr. Hart, of the Trinidad 
Botanical Gardens, who was publishing this in will seriously 
feel his loss. We are fortunate in securing this unique collection 
of ferns for an American herbarium. 
EvizaBetH G. BRITTON. 
