96 DESCRIPTIONS OF N.Z. FERNS. 



Auckland, even the thick fleshy texture being present in a modified degree, while the 

 light green colour seemed to remove them at once from Pt. macilenta. It is just one 

 of those cases where the connefting links are puzzling, though the extreme forms are 

 very widely different. Another form of Pteris comans, known as " variety Endlicher- 

 iana," occurs on some of the islands in the Hauraki Gulf, and is even less divided 

 and more sessile in its parts (even its pinnae being sessile) than the typical plant : yet 

 there is a continuous series of forms from it to the quadri-pinnate Pt. macilenta, with 

 small leaflike pinnules, of the Wanganui valley and elsewhere. 



Pteris comans is easily cultivated; in soil similar to that suited to Pt. macilenta, 

 but grows very slowly. My own plant has been in my possession for six years, and is, 

 I believe, fully twenty years old, and does not yet produce fronds eighteen inches long, 

 while seedlings of Pt. macilenta will grow five feet high in about three years. This 

 makes me think the former a dwarfed littoral form of the latter. It is also called 

 Pteris Endlicheriana, Pteris micropteris, and Litobrochia comans, and occurs in 

 Australia, some of the Polynesian Islands and Juan Fernandez, as well as in 

 New Zealand. 



PTERIS INCISA. (Pter-ris in-si-sa.) 



MAORI NAME " MATUA RARAUHE." 

 PLATE VIII., No. 4. 

 This very handsome fern is found over a very large portion of the globe extending 

 from Southern Asia southward through Africa to the Cape of Good Hope, through 

 Australia, Polynesia and New Zealand to the Auckland Islands, and from the West 

 Indies and Isthmus of Panama through the greater part of South America. As might 

 therefore be expefted, it has been called by a variety of names, such as Pt. montana, 

 Pt. vespertilionis, Pt. Brunoniana, and Litobrochia vespertilionis. It also varies in form 

 in these countries, though in New Zealand it keeps pretty well to one type, only 

 varying a little in the shape of its fronds, and the fulness and texture of its foliage, 

 according to the situation in which it grows. It occurs in all sorts of places, in 

 swamps, in open bush, on ridges, on rotten logs, among rocks, and on hill sides ; but 

 I have never seen it in dense bush, though it often appears beside a road cut through 

 such a bush, or in a clearing within it. It occasionally attains a height of seven feet, 

 and often of five feet, but I have never seen it so luxuriant anywhere as in the 

 immediate vicinity of boiling-springs, where its roots seem to take no harm from the 

 heat of the water. Its rhizome is smooth, stout, and creeping, and produces numerous 

 fronds. Stipes stiff, erect, shining, yellow or light brown, varying in length, but 

 generally about half as long as the frond. Rachis similar in colour and texture. Frond 

 varying from broadly triangular to oblong or ovate lanceolate, hi or tri-pinnate. 

 Colour bright pea green : texture sub-coriaceous, but sometimes thinner than at others. 

 Pinnae stalked, but furnished with pinnules so completely to the base as to appear 



