
518 FERNS. 
proportions of many of the modern species, there are few or 
no traces in the past. 
The interest which thus attaches to a fossil impression of 
an ancient fern, so exquisitely preserved that the venation 
of the frond (leaf) can be studied as a distinctive character, 
as well as in a fresh living specimen, cannot fail to render 
the whole family objects of attention, and help to induce a 
great many people, both old and young, to know something 
of its natural history. A taste for ferns has gradually sprang 
up and extended itself of late, and not. a few have become 
enthusiastic botanists in this single speciality. Others have 
sought their cultivation as objects of special beauty; and 
floriculture has not deemed it beneath its domain to intro- 
duce them into artistic gardening. The delicate and tender 
foliage of some species, the fading tints of pale and tender 
golden yellow on their ripening in autumn, the evergreen 
lustre of others through snow, frosts and cold of winter, the 
curious capsules of others, or the grotesque variations of 
shape in stem and pinnated fronds of still others, have elici- 
ted admiration and interest. Wonderfully adapted to the 
artificial rock-work of picturesque gardening, and enduring, 
with a becoming hardihood, the changing character of so fit 
ful a climate as ours, many of them, some even of foreign 
origin, claim the regard of the amateur cultivator. Others 
more tender and delicate, small and graceful, and of petite 
proportions, thrive under the ample bell-glass, or in t 
Wardian case, and help to enliven the parlor window in the 
wintry season of the year. Rich and costly collections of 
the fern plants occupy glass structures built expressly for 
them, and are more attractive in such luxuriance than far 
more specious and gaudy flowering plants. For it is, doubt- 
less, familiar to the reader that the ferns stand at the hea 
of a very large number of vegetable forms, which can boast 
of no flowering apparatus, to. which neither involucre, BT 
sepal, neither petal nor stamen, neither pistil nor germen 
belong! They are the princes of the flowerless realm of 

