CoLENSO. — Description of luw Plants. 337 



Hab. — Forests between head of Wairarapa Valley and Manawatu River, 

 1850 {W.C.) ; also near Takapau, S.W. end of Ruataniwlia 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 Bir 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 (viiki), * 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. 



Polypodium australe (or Oramviitis 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. paradoxum, and vice versa. 

 That fern was originally described by its discoverer, the celebrated botanist 

 E. 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."t 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." X Bentham a,lso includes with it a new 

 species of Baker's — P. diminutum, from Lord Howe's Island; which also has 

 a "creeping rhizome, surfaces naked, and texture rigidly coriaceous." § 

 This new species of Baker's, I may further observe, is also placed by him 

 as 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. 



* Described in " Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science," vol. ii,, p. 166, 1843. 



t Prodromus " Flora Nova-HoUandiffl," p. 2. 



I Bentliam's " Flora Austr alien sis," vol. vii., p. 762. 



§ " Syn. Fil.," p. 507. 



il Loc. cit., p. 319, 



35 



