If 



—58— 



and western forms is that the western one is clothed thickly with 

 woolly down beneath the leaves, for which reason it has been 

 named 'lanuginosa,' or 'woolly.' " 



The settlers in many parts of British Columbia experience 

 difficulty in fighting ferns when they clear land. It is almost im- 

 possible to clear the roots out of the land with an ordinary plow. 

 A heavy scrub plow has to be used first of all, and then every ef- 

 fort must be made to destroy the fronds as they spring up, and, 

 indeed, this is the only hope for the farmer. These ferns have 

 an extensive underground system of roots and branches which 

 throw up many fronds, but, as in the case of all other plants, the 

 foliage is the stomach of the plant, and if the fronds are kept 

 from forming by constant hoeing or other methods of cultivation, 

 the roots must in time die out." 



THE GEMM/E OF LYCOPODIUM. 



OME time ago a query as to the nature of the small gemmae 



that form in the axils of the upper leaves of some species of 



Lycopodium was published in the Fern Bulletin. A friend 

 of the journal has kindly sent us the quotation on the subject 

 from Sach's Lehrbuch, to which the 6th edition of Gray's Manual 

 refers. It is published herewith. 



"The gemmae or bulbils of L. Selago, which subsequently 

 fall off, are probably products of the leaves, not of the stem: they 

 are apparently axillary. It appears, however, to result, from 

 Cramer's description and drawings, that they spring from the 

 basal part of the leaf itself, at least this is indicated by the cir- 

 cumstance that the vascular bundle does not spring from the 

 cauline but from the foliar bundle. The additional circumstance 

 that sporangia are developed on the earlier leaves of a year's 

 growth, bulbils on the later ones (the branch continuing to grow 

 for years without dichotomising), appears further to justify the 

 supposition that the bulbils occupy morphologically the same 

 position as the sporangia, which in Lycopodium unquestionably 

 originate from the leaves and are not axillary." 



THE stems of ferns are a never-failing source of pleasure and 

 profit to me. If rightly studied they may often aid us in 

 deciding knotty questions. At the extreme base of the 

 stipe of Asplenium acrostichoides, where it is black and flattened 



DIFFERENCES IN FERN STEMS. 



