The American Botanist 



VOL. XX JOLIET, ILL., MAY, 1914 No. 2 



J^ow various greens in faint decrees 

 Tjin^e the tati £froups of man j/ trees; 

 While careless of the chan^iny j/ear, 

 Zjhe pine J cerulean, never sere, 

 TJowers distinguished from the rest, 

 y[nd proudly vaunts his winter vest. 



— Warton. 



THE BEECH FERNS 



By Willard X. Clute. 



T3EGINNERS in fern study usually show a fondness for 

 those species that have sufficient individuality of form 

 to make their separation from other species easy, and are quite 

 willing- to let the advanced students argue specific differences in 

 groups where the species all look pretty much alike and where 

 the decision ma}^ hang on some small difference in veining or 

 the nature of the glands on the indusium. The maidenhair, 

 the polypody, the cinnamon fern and the bracken are thus 

 among the first to be known but it is usually not long before 

 the beech ferns are added to the list if they happen to grow in 

 the collector's region. 



The two species of beech fern are at once easy to dis- 

 tingTiish from other ferns but are themselves so much alike 

 that to distinguish them from each other requires a rather close 

 comparison. The student finds here an excellent exercise in 

 separating closely allied forms without the problem being com- 

 plicated by the suspicion that still other species may be confused 

 with them. With the exception of the much larger and coarser 



