40 



it is now incorporated. Fee's species are largely valid ones, but 

 his work has been discredited by the Hookerian school mostly 

 without having seen Fee's types. With Paris as near London 

 as Washington is near New York, this condition of affairs is posi- 

 tively inexplicable, and absolutely without excuse. 



Thomas Moore (1821-1887) commenced the publication of an 

 admirable Index Filicuni in 1857-63, which contained his fern 

 system (pp. ix— clxii, //. i—S^, and commenced an alphabetical 

 enumeration of ferns and their synonyms (pp. 1-396). Publica- 

 tion unfortunately stopped in the middle of the letter G. The 

 MSS. of the remainder is preserved at Kevv with Moore's exten- 

 •sive herbarium, the latter containing a number of types of species 

 published largely in the Gardeners' Chronicle. Many have asked. 

 Why should this not be published now ? There are many reas- 

 ons., and among them either one of two should decide the ques- 

 tion in the negative, (i) Over three thousand species of ferns 

 have been published since Moore's publication ceased. It would 

 -therefore contain less than half of the known species of ferns and 

 ■so would be notoriously incomplete. (2) In Moore's time the 

 jidea of type localities had not become so all-important in the 

 unatter of systematic study of ferns as it has at the present time. 

 No index can be regarded adequate for modern use that does 

 not give, in addition to its citation, the type locality, /. c, the 

 source from which the species was first described. 



This brief series of papers would be incomplete did we not refer 

 to one other distinguished fern student, Georg Heinrich Mettenius, 

 (1823-1 866) for many years professor at Leipzig. Besides various 

 ■enumerations of the ferns of various countries like Colombia and 

 New Caledonia, Mettenius published (i) his Filiccs Iforti Botaiiici 

 Lipsioisis ( 1 856), in which he early outlined his rather conservative 

 classification, as he recognized only 72 genera, and, (2) a series of 

 monographs of various genera : Plicgoptcris, Clicilanthcs, Polypo- 

 liiuDi, Aspidiuin, and Asplciiiiim, in his Ucbcr einige Fanigat- 

 tungcn. After the untimely death of Mettenius, Kuhn, another 

 brilliant but short-lived German pteridologist, published the Rcli- 

 qidae Mcttcnianac (Linnaea, 35: 385-394. 1868; 36: 41-169. 

 1869), in which some .species were unfortunately published of 



