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lover who is favored by fortune with such discoveries. No one 

 is a greater foe to vandalism than myself, but this is not van- 

 dalism, while mere herbarium accumulations are too often the 

 spoil of such where plants are rare. The procedure I advocate 

 is, furthermore, rewarded by the possibility of exchanging the 

 progeny of the finds for other collectors' acquisitions. A good 

 thing thus rewards its protector and propagator by becoming a 

 little mine, as it were, to its owner, and thus in the long run 

 the fern world is enriched all round instead of being im- 

 poverished. , 



A few days ago I was the fortunate finder of a clump of 

 Lastrea m on tana plumosa, a fine-cut sterile form, of which only 

 four have been found in half a century. I was with a party of 

 five. We dug it up and found it had only four crowns. The 

 find was mine, but I at once divided it. distributing it by ballot 

 as there was a crown short, and now I know when I visit these 

 friends some day, I shall see. not one weather beaten clump 

 on a bleak mountain side obviously out of human ken for de- 

 cades, but several fine specimens probably outrivaling my own 

 at home, while already I am the happy recipient of several 

 gems in exchange. I put it now to your readers, which is the 

 preferable method? 



[The answer to Mr. Druery's query depends somewhat upon 

 whether we admire ferns for pure leaves, or whether we col- 

 lect them for study. Students of ferns know that many fern 

 forms are due merely to varying conditions of soil, light, moist- 

 ure, etc., and are inclined to pay very little attention to them. 

 The editor has seen many of these variants growing wild, and 

 they may be growing there yet. so far as his operations are con- 

 cerned. For ten years he has known of a most unique form of 

 the Christmas fern in the possession of a member of the Fern 

 Chapter, that has never been described. We knpw that many 

 people are cultivating these abnormalities, and such plants are 

 not uncommon in American greenhouses, though usually of 

 British origin ; but the aberrant forms on this side are not made 

 much of simply because the average student looks upon them 

 with much the same feeling as he would upon a seven-toed 

 kitten or a two-headed rabbit. Indeed, there are plenty of 

 botanists here who prefer a wild rose or buttercup to all the gar- 



