ASPIDIUM NEVADENSE. 
SIERRA NEVADA SHIELD-FERN. 
NATURAL ORDER, FILICES. 
ASPIDIUM NEVADENSE, D. C. Eaton.—Root stock rather short, creeping, densely covered with 
the persistent bases of the former stalks; fronds standing in a crown, one anda half to three 
feet high, thin membranaceous, lanceolate in outline, pinnate; pinne sessile, linear-lance- 
olate from a broad heavy base, deeply pinnatifid, the lower pairs distant and gradually 
reduced to mere auricles; lobes crowded, oblong, entire or sparingly toothed, slightly 
hairy on the veins beneath, and sprinkled with minute resinous particles; veins about seven 
pairs to a lobe, simple or a few of the lower ones forked ; sori close to the margin; indu- 
sium minute reniform, furnished with a few dark colored marginal glands, and bearing 
several long straight-jointed hairs on the upper surface. (D.C. Eaton’s Ferms of North 
America.) 
10 the thoroughly informed and systematic botanist the 
Wei} discovery of a new species is unwelcome. His herba- 
rium has been arranged according to some favorite author’s plan 
or according to some approved system of his own, with neat 
catalogues or numbered check lists to correspond, when newly 
discovered species appear and his work has generally to be gone 
over again. The young botanist, however, works with very 
different feeling. The discovery of a new species is a great 
delight to him, and much of the zest with which unexplored 
regions are searched is in the hope that they will yield the 
zealous naturalist something new. California and the regions 
west of the Rocky Mountains have been particularly disastrous 
to those botanists who comparatively few years ago had per- 
fected their systematic arrangement. This territory had much 
to do with the suspension of the /Vora of North America com- 
menced by our famous botanists in 1838,—but the hosts of new 
plants found since that time have added the collectors’ laurels to 
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