—43— 



Miss Mary E. Williams writes that last year in Berkshire, 

 Mass., she found a clump of Cystopteris /rag it is with, well defined 

 crest at the end of each leaf. The position of the plants seemed 

 to indicate that all had sprung from a common ancestor. 



The City of New York can scarcely expect to boast of its 

 native ferns, although these are not so few as one might be in- 

 clined to imagine. A few months since while passing through one 

 of the wilder parts of Bronx Park, I found in a spot where a 

 marshy meadow ends at the foot of a shaded rock outcrop, no 

 less than fourteen species of ferns growing wild within a radius 

 of a hundred feet. The list follows: Adiantum pedatuin, Poly- 

 podium vulgare, Pteris aquilina, Asplenium Filix-foemina 

 Dicksonia pilosiusciila, Dryopteris Noveboracense, D. Thelyp- 

 teris, D. acrostic ho ides, D. viarginalis, Osmunda cinnamomea, 

 O. rega/is, O. Claytoniana, Onoclea sensibilis and Botrychium 

 Virginianum. In the same circle were plants of Equisetum 

 arvense and Selaginella apus. It may well be doubted whether 

 those sections which possess a richer fern flora, can claim a 

 station presenting so many species in so small a circle. — IV. N. C 



The wonders of spore production as well as reproduction are 

 also great. Apart from the ingenious arrangement of the cap- 

 sules and the power of exploding and throwing out the little 

 spores far and wide, there is that of their immense numbers to 

 which I think I have alluded in my former papers. Recently I 

 took a large specimen of Athyrium, the backs cf whose fronds 

 were literally brown with sori, and after somewhat elaborate cal- 

 culation of the number of fronds, number of pinnae, number of 

 pinnules, number of sori per pinnule, number of capsules per sori, 

 and finally number of spores per capsule, I came out with a very 

 mighty string of figures which read as eleven hundred millions. 

 This identical fern had stood in my fernery for quite a a dozen or 

 fifteen years. Every season it has scattered such a harvest as 

 this. This place is full of nooks where spores should thrive, and 

 in many cases do thrive, and yet there rarely appears a chance 

 plant of it. I sow, on the other hand, these spores under glass in 

 a pan and get plants ad libidum. Query, cui bono, as regards the 

 eleven hundred million. The tiny insect world would, I expect, 

 laugh at such a query ; for doubtless they provide food for popu- 

 lations far and away beyond our census. — Charles T. Druery, in 

 report of the British Pteridological Society. 



