THE FERN BULLETIN 



79 



said that the shores of the lake had been swept by forest 

 fires and it had been probably exterminated in that 

 way. It is one of the few remaining survivors of a 

 time when a tropical flora was distributed as far north 

 as Greenland and the S chime as are now represented 

 by only a few tropical species all odd and very highly 

 differentiated. It is not difficult, however, for even an 

 expert botanist to overlook it and one of the members 

 of the Torrey 'Botanical Club is known to have gone to 

 the pine barrens of New Jersey to search for it in a lo- 

 cality where he had found it before and to have come 

 home, as he supposed without it and found it among 

 some sundews which he had brought in a box for his 

 classes. 



At the time the American Association for the Ad- 

 vancement of Science met in Philadelphia in 1884:, the 

 members of the Academy of Natural Sciences 

 organized a botanical excursion to the barrens 

 near Egg Harbor and took a carload of bot- 

 anists there on purpose to find Schisaea and 

 other local plants. Several members of the Brit- 

 ish Association, which held its sessions that 

 year in Montreal, were with us, John Ball, Mr. Carru- 

 thers as well as Dr. Gray, Mr. Redfield, Mr. Canby, 

 and Dr. Bernard Brinton and Mr. I. Marrtindale who 

 acted as guides. We were shown a large patch of the 

 rare and curious fern which is the subject of these 

 notes and to many of the party previously known only 

 from dried specimens. The guides told us that they 

 had discovered it entirely by accident, while sitting 

 near the railroad track eating their luncheon. We all 

 gathered fine specimens some of them six inches high, 

 as well as the plant usually found growing with it in 

 New Jersey, Lyco podium inundatum Bigelovii. We 



