CHAPTER I 



BRITISH FERNS AS A HOBBY * 



There are hobbies and hobbies, and these may be divided into 

 two kinds — natural hobbies, or those which deal with the products 

 of Nature, and artificial hobbies, or those which deal with man's own 

 productions, and of these two the palm must undoubtedly be 

 accorded to the first. To the hobbies devoted to human work 

 there is an inevitable limit, and many are governed by purely 

 artificial tastes which not infrequently impute great value to 

 really worthless things solely on account of their rarity or difficulty 

 of acquisition. With the natural hobby, on the other hand, which 

 deals with Nature's creations, every branch of study which is 

 taken up is soon seen to be inexhaustible, and every thoroughgoing 

 student becomes in time a specialist. Thus in Oliver Wendell 

 Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast Table we find the so-called " ento- 

 mologist " repudiating the term as far too comprehensive, and even 

 confining his study of the beetle family to one section, claiming but 

 to be a scarabaeist. Turning again to the artificial hobby, apart 

 from its inevitable shallowness, where is the " curio," the rare 

 edition, rendered precious, perhaps, by a misprint, that can be 

 multiplied ad infinitum if desired, as, to stick to our subject, 

 a rare fern find can be, which, quite possibly, in addition may 

 spontaneously endow the finder with " editions de luxe " as well 

 under selective cultivation. The writer, to take a concrete example 

 of the growth of a natural hobby, started some thirty years ago as 

 a Fernist, owing to a stray spore of a Doodia caudata, a small 

 growing exotic Fern, developing into a plant under a glass shade 

 containing a fine specimen of Selaginella, the study of which Fern 

 was so interesting as to induce the acquisition of a few more ex- 

 otics, and the provision of a Wardian case in which, by pure chance, 

 a British crested Lady Fern appeared. Not long after that the 

 specialist tendency induced the gift of all the exotics so far 

 acquired to a friend, and, about that time, the British Fern fever 

 was severely caught by an original find on Exmoor of a new variety 

 of the Hard Fern, Bleclmum spicant concinnum Drueryii. Spore- 

 raising resulted in the discovery of proliferous, or bud-bearing 



