Lees : Lastk^a Cristata near Thojine. 



165 



its connection with our county, is shrouded. It were much to be 

 desired that our veteran botanists would give us more than they do 

 of the information stored up in their herbaria, before it is for ever too 

 late to convey it with the force of a persono2 loitne&s — an element 

 often undervalued — without which the dry record even of a duly dated 

 and localised specimen in a collection is not unfrequently liable to a 

 not- to-be-rebutted, if un-provable, assertion of ' transposition of 

 label,' 'inadvertent confusion,' &c. ; more especially in those cases 

 where the fact happens to be singularly notable, or in one way or 

 another subversive of some closet-naturalist's pet latter-day general- 

 isation ! No one who has had much to do with the overhauling of 

 herbaria but must admit that something more or less inexplicable to 

 him is always found ; and therewith comes the not-to-be-satisfied 

 wish that he could have the author at his elbow to settle with the 

 desiderated oral particulars such critical points of interest as are 

 otherwise peculiarly liable to be misconstrued, or read variously. 



What has been published as to the occurrence of Ladrcea cristata 

 in South Yorkshire is worth recounting. Edward Newman, in the 

 first edition of his British Ferns (1844), makes no mention of it as a 

 Yorkshire plant at all. Henry Baines, in his Flora of Yorkshire 

 (1840), does not name it as a Thorne plant, or indeed at all ; either, 

 if my view be correct as to the ''Aspidium cristatum ' given (loc. cit., p. 

 123), as occurring 'on Plumpton Rocks, near Knaresbro',' being wo^ 

 our Lastrcea^ but the cristate-fronded variety of the male fern {L. Filix- 

 Mas.)* Dr. Carrington says this Plumpton plant appears to have 

 been L. spinulosa, but that does not occur on the rocks in question, 

 A Filix-Mas (in three or four varieties), and L. dilatata, with FoIt/- 

 f odium vulgare only growing thereon. 



Later by fourteen years, Baker, in his Supplement to Baines 

 (1854), gives L. cristata^ judiciously, as ' incognit,' remarking on the 

 necessity for re-observance. 



* Note. — I am, perhaps, confirmed in this by the very earhest record for the 

 ' cristatum,'' in connection with Yorkshire, which occurs. Jonathan Salt, in his 

 MSS. Flora Shejffmldiensis, 1800 (in the library of the Sheffield Lit. and Phil. 

 Society), has ' P. cristatum. — In woods not uncommon,' and he had, undoubtedly, 

 no knowledge of the species under consideration, yclept ' Ehrhart's ' bog-fern by 

 Newman. There was a Folypodium cristaium of Linnaeus ; but the name as used 

 by writers from 1800 to 1840, clearly shews that they had rather the original 

 Folypodium spinulosum in view; although Newman (1. c, p. 216) distinctly says 

 he could not make out Lastrcca spinulosa to be either the Folypodium spinulosum^ 

 as supposed by Willdenow, or the Linnaean F. cristatum, as supposed by Bolton 

 and Withering. 



