THE > 
JOURNAL OF BOTANY 
BRITISH AND FOREIGN. 
Ovigtnal Articles. 
A SYNOPSIS OF THE GENUS SELAGINELLA. 
By J. G. Baxer, F.R.S., &c. 
Ferns excluded, half the known number of species of vascular 
8 Lea snp belong to the genus Selaginella, as recast by Spring. 
What about them from a structural, systematic, and 
seattle ate sth of view was fully and ¢ arefully summed up by 
Spring in the second volume of ey rier on the Lycopo- 
diacew’ which was published in 1848. Since that date a large 
but only a small proportion of them have been named and de-— 
scribed. The genus at the present time would make an excellent 
subject for a new monograph on the scale of Spring’s, and I should 
much like to recommend such an undertaking to any of our 
younger cryptogamists who are in search of a speciality. What I 
pope attempted in the present paper is merely a working synopsis 
n the same scale as our ‘ Synopsis Filicum.’ The leaf-organs in 
this genus, by their arrangement upon either a distichous or multi- 
farious plan and their uniformity in shape and character or dimor- 
phism, furnish four excellent primary subdivisions, and there is 
seldom, although not invar = y, any room for doubt under which 
any given species, when a state of fructification, should be 
classified. In Selaginella aemoeghist | in shape and the distichous 
hand, uniformity in shape and the multifarious plan in arrange 
ment is almost universal, there being three exceptional species 
(complanatum, volubile, and scariosum). The Se aginellas have always 
ctification concentrated into a distinct terminal spike, never 
as in the Selago Lycopodiums (which constitute half the digi’ and 
Psilotum, plone. in the axils of entirely unmodified leaves all down 
estem. Ina minority, but yet a considerable number of ata’ 
ginellas, dimorphism in shape and a distichous plan of arrangement 
carried out not only in the Hepes leaves, but also in the bracts 
Vou, 21. [Janvary, 1888.] B 
