﻿THE FERX BULLETIN 



103 



of the adder' s-tongue. Further search revealed a 

 populous colony. 



Three or four days later at the Rideau fern- while 

 my friend was inspecting some BotrycJiium ternatum 

 on the turf-grass margin of a beaver meadow he spied 

 the adder' s-tongue and we soon ran to earth an ex- 

 tensive colony. AYe showed the plant to an old pupil 

 of mine who is working a mica property in the town- 

 ship of Burgess. He said he was sure it grew "out at 

 the mine.'' This we ventured to doubt, for we still 

 clung fondly .to the fair illusion of its rarity. He 

 drove us to the mine and we found the plant in and 

 about two moist hollows of beaver-grass. Till then 

 our finds had been accidental and we had stumbled on 

 a singly colony in three distinct localities, but that day 

 we went deliberately to likely places and in two out of 

 three beaver meadows that we examined, the adders- 

 tongue was growing. 



That was the last week of July and we spent August 

 in the Algonquin Park, one of Ontario's Provin- 

 cial forest reserves. As there are no meadows and few- 

 clearings we no longer thought of. Ophioglossum 

 At the beginning of September my friend having 

 sailed for Liverpool I returned to the Rideau and on a 

 visit to the little brook where we had found the 

 Ophioglossum a month ago. I found the beaver grass 

 had been mown and the Ophioglossum had faded yel- 

 low and was quite easily detected. It was quite sad to 

 see how many of the spikes of the fern had been muti- 

 lated by the mowers. I found four colonies of the 

 plant established on both banks of the little stream 

 over a space of about a quarter of a mile. Then I 

 spent two days at the mica mine and found four more 

 colonies in various parts of the property. 



