78 



THE FERN BULLETIN 



tris w hich at that time was known to occur only in one 

 other station in North America. We landed a short 

 distance beyond, attracted by the fragrance of a bed 

 of the beautiful pink orchid, Pogonia ophioglossoidcs. 

 Here the shore sloped away in a smooth sandy beach, 

 but the bank formed a turfy seat about a foot higher 

 than the beach, matted and held together by the stout 

 black rhizomes of the royal fern and sweet gale. I 

 knelt down to dig up a good plant of the orchid so as 

 to get the roots, and there, growing under the edge of 

 the miniature bank I found Schizaca pusilla. The 

 plants were very small and the fertile spike still imma- 

 ture but I recognized it though I had not seen it grow- 

 ing before because I had specimens of it from the pine 

 barrens of New Jersey. I left it growing for a month 

 longer and then collected a few specimens, nearly all 

 there were, none of them more than t two inches in 

 height. One of these was sent to Prof. Eaton at Yale, 

 one to Dr. Gray at Harvard and one in the herbarium 

 of Columbia College and two others are in private col- 

 lections. Dr. Gray was delighted to receive his and 

 wrote to me that he had seen long ago the specimens 

 collected by DePylaie in Newfoundland in the Her- 

 barium of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris but that 

 everyone had supposed until I had discovered it again 

 in Nova Scotia that the locality cited w r as incorrect and 

 that the specimens must have come from New Jersey. 

 He sent me in return a small package of rare ferns, 

 among them the smallest and rarest one found in the 

 United States, Trichomanes Pctersii which grows on 

 wet rocks in Alabama, the only representative we have 

 of a small group of the large tropical family of the 

 filmy ferns. Prof. MacKay of Nova Scotia has since 

 searched the locality where I found it but in vain. He 



