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that species, and these plants are utterly unlike any known 

 variety of L. pvopinqua. They are only three or four inches 

 high, dark green, extremely dense and hard in texture, and 

 the small fronds branched at one or more points. Mr. 

 Whitwell, whose authority and experience are unimpeach- 

 able, has various forms of L. pvopinqua in his collection, 

 and the possibility of stray spores from them cannot be 

 overlooked; nevertheless, there is not a form among them 

 to which he or the writer could impute the parentage, and, 

 as has been said, several plants precisely alike originated 

 simultaneously. 



Another case associated with Blechnum spicant may be 

 cited, viz. Hartley's B. s. crispissimum, a dwarf, dense form 

 two or three inches high only, which came en masse from a 

 sowing of B. s. strictum, a long and somewhat narrow form 

 to which the whole batch presents no similarity at all, 

 and, again, is diverse from any known type. I raised a 

 batch of this myself, and found even the prothalli to be 

 thick and fleshy masses instead of the usually thin laminae. 

 A third still more mysterious case is that of P. aqnilina 

 gvandiceps depanpevata, which appeared spontaneously and 

 simultaneously in five different and isolated places in 

 Messrs. Birkenhead's nursery at Sale, near Manchester. 

 This has lax, pendulous fronds, repeatedly branching into 

 slender, depauperate, tasselled ramifications^ All the 

 plants were alike, and yet they occurred in widely separated 

 houses at one and the same time as chance seedlings. 

 They resemble no other known variety at all, and the 

 only theory that can be formed is that somewhere, at the 

 place where peat or leaf-mould had been taken and 

 supplied to the nursery, a wild sport of the type existed or 

 exists, whose spores had thus been imported into suitable 

 quarters for development. This was eventually lost to 

 cultivation. 



In the former case we have a feasible theory, but what 



