THEIR NOMENCLATURE. A157 
of the third edition. I may add, however, in referring to Mr. 
Newman’s nana, that my experience with living roots sent to me 
as “dwarf dilatata” by Mr. Tatham, is exactly the opposite of the 
statements made on the pages referred to. In my own garden, 
Mr. Tatham’s plants have gradually increased in size and resem- 
blance to ordinary dilatata, until they have become so similar 
thereto, that I should doubtless have passed by them as simply 
dilatata, if found wild. It seems safe to assume that Smith never 
knew L. amula. As Gray had done in 1821, so Smith in 1828 
added true cristata to his enumeration of English ferns; but his 
specimens of it had been received from Francis in 1805, after 
publication of the ‘ Flora Britannica.’ 
Mr. Newman’s beautiful ‘History of British Ferns’ began a 
new era in our fern-literature. True, the work of G. W. Francis 
was the first to meet the rising taste for ferns, being three years 
earlier in the field; but his figures were too small for clearness, 
and wanted the artistic elegance of those which adorn Newman’s 
works. The first edition of the ‘ History,’ indeed, gave only faint 
prognostication of what it subsequently became. In that edition, 
Mr. Newman started as a severe unionist; and it was not until 
the second edition, 1844, that he changed sides (on better know- 
ledge?) and became as decidedly a separatist. In the first edition 
we find cristata kept apart, but Smith’s other three species 
(dilatata, dumetorum, spinulosa) clubbed together under the one 
name of dilatata, made applicable to all. But four subordinate 
forms are clearly enough distinguished even in that first tentative 
edition, namely, Smith's three species with the addition of Bree’s 
recurva, subsequently known as Fenisecii of Lowe, and then 
as e@mula. In the second edition three several species are 
described under the names of multiflora, spinosa, and recurva ; 
the dumetorum of Smith figuring as variety nana of the first. 
These names meant the species now familiar to us as dilatata, 
spinulosa, and emula; names much more correct than those of 
Mr. Newman, according to botanical rules. In his successive 
editions Mr. Newman fell more and more into the egotism of 
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