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to family tradition, are climbers still, often reaching 

 heights of thirty feet or more, but there are other genera, 

 such as Dayallia, Blechnum, Hypolepis, Poly podium, 

 Acrostichum and others that have climbing species, the 

 hope that actuates them all being that by this means they 

 will be able to get up in the world and obtain light and 

 air. Some of these merely trail over bushes and trees, 

 having hooked prickles upon the rachis to assist in hold- 

 ing, but nevertheless often reaching considerable heights 

 and forming impassable thickets. Others are true twiners 

 and, though born on the earth, soon scramble up to the 

 top of its shelter. One Acrostichum with brown, scaly 

 rootstock as thick as one's thumb, sends it straight up 

 the trunks to heights of twenty feet or more precisely 

 as our poison ivy does. Then it sends out its great fronds 

 a yard across. 



This hints at the possible origin of the tree ferns, for 

 if the trunk were but a little thicker and inclined to 

 stand upon its own resources, we should have a tree fern. 

 The tree-ferns proper are frequently as tall as small 

 trees with magnificent crowns of fronds. To get a 

 good idea of what a tree-fern is like, take a pole, perch 

 a big plant of the ostrich fern at top, wrap the pole 

 thickly with barbed wire and small rootlets and you 

 have it. There is no climbing fern trees unless one is 

 insensible to thorns an inch long; and after one has 

 once slipped in the forest and stayed himself by clutch- 

 ing at a tree-fern's trunk he will resolve to fall a long 

 way in the future before trying to stop a second time in 

 that way. 



Climbing other trees for ferns, however, is quite the 

 thing. I have a lively recollection of balancing upon a 

 slender branch and trying to reach some specimens of 

 Poly podium gramineum that were sitting in a row on 

 a limb fully twenty feet from the ground. Many grow 

 at greater heights and quite out of reach. In regions 

 where a daily bath in the clouds keeps their rootstocks 

 and roots moist, numerous species escape the crush below 



