©ulMmMa Winivitvsitvi in tti* ^itia af §;m Wiovh, 



Department of Botany 



16 HaMember 19oo 



My dear Mr-. Davenport, 



In response to your request for corrections to your 

 list of localities for ferns I will say that in looking up the quest io^t 

 of Phegopteris it is evident that P. Phegopteris only goes a moderate 

 distance south and that the reference to Virginia is probably incorre^^- 

 there is a specimen so named in the Harvard collection but it is clearly 

 P. hexagonoptera. I suppose that a note vriii come oiit with reference to 

 Cheilanthes lanosa being foimd on West rocX in New Haven abundant l y 

 and I understand that the station on Manhattan Island is still intact, 



I have just noticed in Rhodora how you are adding to synonymy — a 

 matter that you have usvially claimed that we were having a monopoly in. 



Dicksonia pilosiuscula var. cristata contains two palpable errors 

 I can conceive how yo\i still stick to the view of the oldest name under 

 the gen\is as a matter of conservative action but I cannot conceive how 

 in the light of all recent investigation that divides the fern in ques - 

 tion b y the width of a family from the genus Dic'feonia you can adhere to 

 that generic name which belongs to an entirely different group of plants; 

 Surely this cannot be explained on the ground of conservat i^^. The 

 principle of the first name under the genus is^even repudiated by the X 

 Kew people who are working on ferns where the principle originated and 

 the hybrid Berlin school utterly repudiates it. I cannot look upon the 

 variety as one that is in the act of forming a species but more as a 

 sport that has become perpetuated like the similar variety in Polypo- 

 diiam vulgare that l^ir. Peck described some time ago. 



