CoLenso.—Description of new Plants. 337 
Hab.—Forests between head of Wairarapa Valley and Manawatu River, 
1850 (W.C.) ; also near Takapau, S.W. end of Ruataniwha Plains, Hawke’s 
Bay, 1881 (Mr. John Stewart) ; on the ground. 
This little fern has been long known to me, though, originally, only 
from a single plant of some 4-5 fronds, discovered by me in 1850, and 
though often sought (in subsequent travelling through those woods) never 
again met with: specimens of its fronds were sent to Sir W. J. Hooker; 
those, however, were not in so good a state (being only old) as these I have 
lately received from Mr. Stewart. And, no doubt, at Kew, those have been 
considered and described as belonging to Polypodium australe. To this, 
however, I could never consent, for I know P. australe well; two other 
allied yet much smaller New Zealand ferns, have also been described with 
it, viz., Grammitis ciliata ( mihi), * which always grows in single plants on 
trees—and a curious stout dwarf broadly spathulate form, from holes and 
cavernous places in the rocks on the hills, which always grows in dense 
masses, f 
Polypodium australe (or Grammitis australis), vera, with which (as I take 
it) other allied ferns have been mixed up, is altogether a very different plant, 
and possesses characters not to be found in P. paradoaum, and vice versa. 
That fern was originally described by its discoverer, the celebrated botanist 
R. Brown, who also (as he says) had the great advantage of seeing it in its 
living state; Brown describes it as “ frondibus linearibus v. lanceolato- 
linearibus obtusiusculis, integris glabris, marginibus simplicibus.”+ And 
just so its latest describer, Bentham, who describes it more fully and from 
ample specimens, obtained from various places in Australia and Tasmania, 
Saying—“ Fronds entire, coriaceous, glabrous, * * * contracted into 
a short stipes. Veins * * once or twice forked, free, and concealed in 
the thick substance of the frond.” { Bentham also includes with it a new 
Species of Baker’s—P. diminutum, from Lord Howe's Island; which also has 
% “creeping rhizome, surfaces naked, and texture rigidly coriaceous.” § 
This new species of Baker’s, I may further observe, is also placed by him 
&$ coming next in regular natural succession to P. australe, and, like that 
Species, belonging to what he has classed as the ‘‘ Eremobryoid series (of 
the genus), having their stems articulated at the point of junction with the 
(creeping) rhizome ;’ || to which natural series the plant I have above 
described does not belong. 
© © Pacaibed ty OP gaan Tocca OF Metal Bela wk p. 166, 1943. 
+ Prodromua ‘ Flora Nov#-Hollandie,” p. 2. oe 
t Bentham’s “ Flora Australiensis,” vol. vii, p. 762. 
= § “Syn. Fil.” p.507 
|| Loe. ett., p. 319. 
