76 



THE FERN BULLETIN 



countryman at Heston, Middlesex, informed an in- 

 quirer that when he was a young man he had fre- 

 quently taken part in catching the ''fern-seed" at mid- 

 night on the eve of St. John the Baptist. The attempt 

 to catch it was, he said, often unsuccessful, for a plate 

 had to be placed beneath the fern, and the seed must 

 fall into it "of its own accord," without any shaking 

 of the plant. Another searcher of fern-seed reports 

 that the seed must be looked for on Midsummer's 

 Eve, and that the searcher must go barefoot, and with 

 no other clothing than a shift. He stated that when 

 he went to gather it the "spirits" (presumably moths 

 or other nocturnal insects) whisked by his ears, and 

 sometimes struck his hat and various parts of his body. 

 At length, when he thought he had gathered a good 

 quantity of it and secured it in paper and a box, he 

 went home. But on examining the paper and the box 

 he found both empty! He does not say how he ex- 

 pected to detect its presence, being a thing invisible! 

 That appears to have been a distinctive and curious 

 feature about capturing fern-seed. 



The ancients (Greeks and Romans) held that there 

 was no such thing, that ferns did not produce any seed. 

 As to how they propogated no decisive opinion existed. 

 The mediaeval folk improved upon this. They said, 

 "Ferns must reproduce by seed as other plants do, and 

 since the ancients say that ferns have no seed, that 

 must be due to the fact that the seed is there, but is in- 

 visible !" Accordingly, they firmly held that ferns pro- 

 duce invisible seed, and then added to this conception, 

 in accordance with the doctrine of signatures, the as- 

 sertion that he who gained possession of some of this 

 invisible seed would himself become invisible. The de- 

 lightful absurdity of hunting on Midsummer's night 

 for invisible seed, as to your success in finding which 



