142 DESCRIPTIONS OF N.Z. FERNS. 



cultivated, needing little moisture or shelter, and producing fronds up to two feet higfi. 

 It has long, branching, thick, fleshy rhizomes, of a bright green colour, dotted 

 over with dark scales, and often spreading over an area of many square yards. Stipes 

 variable in length, strong, smooth, dark-coloured, and furnished above with a wing, 

 which gradually widens out into the web of the frond. Rachis glossy and brown. 

 Fronds vary greatly in shape. Sometimes they are ovate-lanceolate (No. 4 on plate) 

 and retain that form even when fertile. At others they become very much widened 

 out into long bluntly-pointed lobes, which are very broad in the barren fronds (No. 4a on 

 plate). In this state, the fertile fronds (No. 4b on plate) are much larger, with more 

 numerous and narrower pinnae, which sometimes branch again into a number of similar 

 lobes, and so produce an extremely handsome truly bi-pinnatifid frond. Texture 

 coriaceous: colour bright green with the anastomosing veins showing very distinftly, 

 which makes it rather a favourite plant with those who grow ferns merely as ornaments 

 for the house. Dwarfed forms occur at high levels, and on rocks, but the smallest is 

 one that is found in the Canterbury District. Its rhizomes are not more than a 

 sixteenth of an inch thick, and the fronds (stipes included) are not more than from a 

 half to one and a half inch long. They are almost all lanceolate, only a very few 

 being slightly indented into lobes on either side. 



POLYPODIUM NOV^ ZELANDI^. (Pol-ly-po-de-um No-vse Ze-land-di-ae.) 



PLATE XXVII., ITo. 3. 



This fern is confined to New Zealand. I was the first person who discovered it, 

 in January, 1876, in the red-birch forest about 15 miles south-west of Ruapehu, and it 

 was found by Mr. T. F. Cheeseman in the following year, on the Pirongia Mountain, 

 between the Waikato River and the West Coast of the North Island. These two 

 points mark its extreme north and south range, in the forests West of Ruapehu and 

 Taupo Lake, to which it was believed to be confined; though a plant, supposed to be 

 the same, has lately been reported from the birch country adjacent to the Waikare lake. 



It has stout, hard, creeping, very scaly rhizomes, as thick as a man's little finger, 

 growing almost exclusively on trees ; I think only on the red-birch, for though I have 

 spent many months in the forest in which it occurs, I never saw it on any other tree, 

 or on the ground, and only occasionally on fallen rotten birch trees. The stipes is 

 rather long, dark brown, and shining ; and the rachis the same, and rather narrowly 

 winged throughout. Frojid oblong, pinnate. The pinnae are numerous, and arranged 

 in opposite pairs (sometimes twenty or more pairs in a frond four feet long), long, 

 narrow, lanceolate, decurrent on lower side, pointing obliquely upwards, and often 

 slightly crenated in the edges, when the sori are developed. Texture thinly coria- 

 ceous : colour dark green, with indistinct anastomosing veins. There are no barren 

 pinnatifid fronds, and simple ones only on very young plants. Sori large, in one row 

 on each side of costae. I have tried repeatedly, in vain, to grow this fern, even 



