PREFACE. 



The demand for a compendious and handy description of the Ferns 

 of New Zealand has led to the publication of more than one little 

 work on the subject ; but from one cause or another these books have 

 rapidly passed out of print, so that the collector — desirous of 

 identifying the plants he obtains — is obliged to consult Hooker's 

 " Handbook of the New Zealand Flora," a work which is too general 

 in its outline for his purposes, and which is already somewhat out of 

 date. To satisfy this demand, the author has been led to prepare 

 this small manual, in the hope that it will meet the requirements of 

 the ease and will prove to be longer-lived and of more lasting value 

 than its predecessors. 



The usual demand in such a work is that it shall be written in a 

 "popular" style and in "popular" language — in other words, that 

 all technical terms shall be avoided in descriptions. Books of this 

 class are in the majority of cases xmsatisfactory, usually lacking that 

 scientific accuracy which is the first requirement of such works, but 

 chiefly being defective in conciseness of description and exactness of 

 phraseology. They fail to satisfy those who want scientific descrip- 

 tions, and are not sufficiently explicit for those who have little 

 knowledge of the subjects treated of. A large technical vocabulary 

 has grown up round the literature of ferns, which it is impossible to 

 ignore altogether. No one can lay claim to a knowledge of these 

 plants without knowing something also of this terminology ; for it 

 is impossible to examine fei-ns without finding characters and points 

 of structure which our ordinary vocabulary fails to describe aptly. 

 There is hardly any pursuit or study which has not a terminology of 

 its own, and the student of ferns will find that there is such a 

 terminology in his branch, and that it has to be mastered before he 

 can make satisfactory progress in the identification of species. The 

 author has therefore deemed it advisable to write the descriptive 



