THE FERN BULLETIN 



77 



you could never come to any conclusion except by 

 yourself becoming invisible, seems to have taken firm 

 hold on those who loved noctural rambles on summer 

 nig-hts in company, and to have suited the mystifica- 

 tions and chicanery of the wizards and magicians of 

 the day. The pursuit of fern-seed suggests Lord 

 Bowen's evocation of "a blind man in a dark room 

 seeking for a black cat — which is not there," to 

 which combination he compared the study of metaphy- 

 sics. 



The most delightful piece of absurdity in the whole 

 affair is, as I have already pointed out, that ferns of all 

 kinds do produce a sort of seed — the brown or yellow 

 circular or oblong up-growths on the under surface of 

 their leaves, which are little cases filled with "spores." 

 They do not. ripen till full summer or autumn, and on 

 St. John's Eve, when the fern-seed hunter went forth, 

 they are truly enough invisible, and practically non- 

 existent. — From an article by Sir Ray Lankcstcr. 



HOW I FOUND SCHIZAEA PUSILLA. 



We were paddling around the shores of Grand Lake, 

 Nova Scotia, in a birch-bark canoe searching for a 

 nice beach, intending to take a bath. It was the middle 

 of July, 1879 and we had gone all around the island 

 where the loons nested, whose quavering call at night 

 added so much charm to that wild and lonely lake, but 

 nowhere had we found a smooth stretch of beach. 

 Finally we crossed over to the shore where the bits of 

 bark from the tannery had floated down in the stream 

 and formed a delta on the shore where it emptied into 

 the lake. Here were brilliant masses of the fragrant 

 Utricularia cornuta and among the stones near by 

 grew that rare little European plant, Littorella lacus- 



