CHEILANTHES VESTITA. 
HAIRY LIP-FERN. 
NATURAL ORDER, FILICES. 
CHEILANTHES VESTITA, Swartz.—Fronds broadly lanceolate, like the stalks hirsute with rusty 
hairs, bipinnate; pinnze triangular-ovate; pinnules oblong, obtuse, more or less incised; 
the ends of the lobes reflexed to form separate herbaceous involucres. Fronds four to 
eight inches long, becoming smooth above. (Chapman’s Flora of the Southern United 
States. See also Wood’s Class- Book of Botany, Gray’s Flora of the Northern United States, 
Eaton’s Ferns of North America, and Williamson’s ferns of Kentucky.) 
;ERNS have no small part of the world allotted to them. 
i] Though but a fraction of the vegetable kingdom, they 
cna every portion of it with flowering plants. There is no 
spot, however rocky and dry, but some ferns may be found as 
well as where the soil is deep, and in damp or marshy places. In 
altitudes high up among the clouds ferns exist, as well as in low 
situations near the level of the sea. In the arctics and in the 
tropics—there is scarcely a spot on the habitable globe wherein 
the lover of plants may not expect to finda fern. The greater 
part of the Ferns of the Eastern United States love the shade 
of woods, or to be in rich or damp meadows; and those that 
live on rocks are usually found where there is shade above them, 
or cool moisture about the roots. But our present species, 
Cheilanthes vesttta—the Hairy Lip-Fern—is one which grows in 
the clefts of dry rocks, sometimes in exposed sunny places, 
where often in the summer season it dries and curls up, and ap- 
pears as if dead. In this condition it has been found by the 
writer on rocks along the Schuylkill river, and in Southern 
Illinois. 
Most species of fern are admired for their thin. filmy fronds ; 
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