[96 



.hedge close to his house, and thought to have "a funny- 

 look " about it by the finder. Finally, as an inducement to 

 -fern hunting, we have the incontrovertible fact that many 

 of these wild sports are far more beautiful than the normal 

 forms, and as such constitute decorative foliage plants of 

 highest merit. 



A word may be added in reference to the soral bulbils, 

 as these occurrences should afford good material for the 

 morphological study of the sporangium . Professor Bower's 

 monograph on apospory and allied phenomena, already 

 cited, gives some illustration of this, and the writer's 

 previous paper J also alluded thereto. Since then, how- 

 ever, such soral bulbils have been recorded as occurring 

 on Adiantum capillus-Venevis vars. daphnites and imbricatum, 

 and on Poly podium vulgar e elegantissimum, while most of the 

 superbum section of plumose Athyria have inherited the 

 capacity from the original wild Axminster find. In all 

 these cases the bulbils are seated on the soral sites, and 

 are usually accompanied by sporangia grading from im- 

 perfect and aborted ones to perfect ones with full comple- 

 ment of perfect spores which germinate freely and yield 

 fairly typical plants. In the case of the Polypodium, 

 such bulbils occur only on the most highly developed 

 fronds, and on pinnules of extremely fine cutting, the 

 terminals of which run out into nearly inch long lingual 

 extensions, pointing I think to aposporal tendencies. 

 The sori are massive and consist oi filamentous processes, 

 some of which lengthen out into fronds, while others form 

 perfect sporangia of normal golden yellow colour. Here, 

 then, do not appear those massive cellular growths which 

 are found on the Athyria, but in time one bulbil gets the 

 predominance and a little plant of several small fronds is 

 developed. Unfortunately, neither my leisure nor my 



{ Jour. Linn. Soc. 21 : 254. 884. 



