94 



THE FERN BULLETIN 



that will serve the purpose better than any society 

 while fern exchanges may be effected expeditiously 

 without recourse to an association. The Fern So- 

 ciety has recently done nothing fur its members be- 

 cause there was nothing it could do. It has ceased to 

 promote the study of ferns and seeks to justify its ex- 

 istence by changes of many kinds : changes in constitu- 

 tion, in methods of doing business in publications, in 

 nomenclature, and in treatment of its members. We 

 repeat, The Fern Society is dead. It is dead but it 

 don't know it. 



* * * 



If language is considered merely as a means of con- 

 veying ideas, it really doesn't matter whether the 

 young fern is called a seedling, as is the custom 

 among the British, or whether we call it a sporeling 

 after the fashion on this side of the world, but if we. 

 wish to be exact there are no two ways out of the 

 matter. Seedlings and sporelings are two very dif- 

 ferent things. The old idea that they are identical or 

 even homologous dies hard, however. In a recent 

 publication, a well known fern student writes, "I have 

 always regarded the two kinds of organs under the 

 fern prothallus as the 'homologues' or counterparts 

 of pollen grains and ovaries in the flowering plants. 

 They perform the same functions entirely, though in 

 somewhat different fashions and I cannot but regard 

 it as 'hairsplitting' to raise objections to the parallel, 

 or, under such circumstances, to find fault with the use 

 of the word 'seedlings' instead of 'sporelings' in con- 

 nection with young ferns so raised." The same 

 writer further says that ferns grown by apogamy are 

 true sporelings. The point of the whole matter, how- 

 ever, is that a seed is a definite entity, consisting of a 



