— no — 



These improved types, or garden forms proper, possess, how- 

 ever, despite their greater beauty, a secondary interest in the fern 

 hunter's mind. It is a great pleasure to him, undoubtedly, to dis- 

 cover an extra good thing among his seedlings (an admissable 

 term as the plants arise from a fertilized ovum embedded in the 

 prothallus), but his glee is ten-fold greater when he finds a new 

 thing on the hillside, in the glen, on the moor, or even by the 

 roadside. Thousands of ferns of the common type have passed 

 beneath his eye all practically alike as peas, and then suddenly 

 it may be but a frond tip, it may be a bush, strikes him in the 

 distance as unfamiliar. He approaches and with a heart ever 

 beating faster, he acquires the conviction that it fits with nothing 

 known to him and finally he stands before a thoroughbred marked 

 throughout with novel features. That is a moment never to be 

 forgotten, and the writer speaks feelingly, for thanks to good 

 luck he has many such episodes in his own memory. No royal 

 road exists to such finds. They appear to turn up absolutely in- 

 discriminately and irrespective of environment. As a rule they 

 are solitary plants of their kind, though they may be one in a 

 crowd of their species. Rarely a small colony may be found, due 

 presumably to scattered spores of an original sport. Generally, 

 also, they come true from their spores, and it is this fact which 

 technically qualifies them as species, per se, for granting such con- 

 stancy no specific definition can exclude them. Personally, how- 

 ever, we blame the defective definition, for to admit them as 

 species, in the case of over 1,100 finds, would be an absurdity. On 

 the other hand, some of the more prominent botanists of the 

 present day, in Germany especially, are contending, and we think 

 with much force, that these "sports" have probably played a more 

 important role in the specific evolution of all branches of the 

 biological tree than has hitherto been conceded them. 



Finally, I would beg our fern-loving American cousins to 

 profit by the fern lore of this side of the ocean and thus avoid 

 the risk to which I have previously alluded in the Bulletin of 

 compiling separate and perhaps conflicting lists of names. 

 Nomenclature already is a bug-bear, largely due to the inde- 

 pendence of name-givers. Let us, as fern lovers, do what we can 

 to avoid a spread of the evil, at any rate so far as the species 



