The American Botanist 



VOL. XXII JOLIET, ILL., FEBRUARY, 1916 No. 1 



^verj/ clod feels a stir of mi£^ht 



J^n instinct within it that reaches and towers 

 ^nd ^ropiny dlindly above it for li^ht 



Climbs to a soul in the ^rass and the flowers. 



— Lowell. 



THE TREE FERNS OF HAWAII 



By Vaughan MacCaughey. 



I 'HE tree ferns are undoubtedly a declining race. Long 

 ago the humid epoch of their dominance waxed and 

 waned. The coal beds reveal the deathless delicacy of those 

 ancient fronds. The slate strata are sprinkled with the leaf- 

 prints of the primitive plant-world. Few sights stir the botanic 

 imagination as does a cabinet of fern fossils. Each fragment 

 visualizes an earth-epoch antedating today by immeasurable 

 vastnesses of time. The cinematograph-reel of paleobotany 

 whirls back, and flashes strange pictures of illimitable jungle- 

 forests — skirting the world mountains, girdling the Poles, cov- 

 ering great areas of China, Australia, and man}^ other lands. 

 The coal and oil fields of today are the herbaria, the cemetaries, 

 of those spacious Carboniferous swamps. 



Recent studies in paleobotany have necessitated extensive 

 revisions oi current ideas concerning the Carboniferous fern- 

 floTa. The prevalent conception of the arborescent pterido- 

 phytes as constituting the major part of the swamp-forest veg- 

 etation, has been demonstrated to be erroneous. Many of the 



