226 [Proc. B. N. F. C, 



to wild roses, and never even distantly alluding to the glorious 

 array of Marechal Neil, Gloire de Dijon, and the hundreds of 

 rivals of the queen of flowers ? Yet this is precisely what has 

 been done in ferns. The time has happily passed when all 

 botanists were content to regard the varieties of ferns as only 

 monstrosities — mere garden varieties. It has long been re- 

 cognised that, with very few exceptions, all the more marked 

 forms have been found growing wild, nature being solely re- 

 sponsible for them. It is also beginning to be recognised that 

 varieties do not appear at haphazard, but in conformity with 

 certain fixed laws of development or deviation to which all 

 species are more or less subject. The varieties of ferns cannot, 

 therefore, be dismissed without attention, even if the extreme 

 beauty of many of them did not render this impossible. He 

 must, indeed, be wanting in some quality of sense or in know- 

 ledge who can regard all the varieties of the British ferns as 

 only degradations. Can it be maintained that many of them 

 are not in every sense higher developments, possessing, with all 

 the symmetry of the normal form, greater delicacy of division 

 and of texture, more freshness and variety of colour, more grace 

 of habit, often larger size, and at times an intricacy of detail or 

 of structure which interests the mind not less than it attracts 

 the eye ? 



The late Colonel Jones, of Clifton, that facile princeps of tern- 

 hunters and raisers, in a paper read before the Bristol Naturalibts' 

 Society, 1888, after enumerating the ferns found in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Bristol and Somersetshire, says : — " It was in the 

 lower parts of the Quantock district that the late Mr. Elworthy, 

 many years ago, made those remarkable finds in Polystichum 

 annulare which helped to give a greatly increased interest to 

 the study of British ferns ; and subsequently Mr. G. B. 

 Wollaston, Rev. C. Padley, Dr. Wills, and Colonel Jones found 

 many fine and distinct varieties in the same district. Nor may 

 it be without interest to bear in mind that it was in this same 

 district which formed Mr. Elworthy's happy hunting ground, 

 that Mr. Perceval made his remarkable discovery of Devonian 



