4 
European Ferns. 
WOODSIA. 
E genus Woodsia, although not a large one, about fourteen species being 
enumerated, is of wide distribution. Besides the three natives of Europe, 
of which we have to speak at length, one species is confined to Natal, two 
are peculiar to Northern India, one is limited to the Caucasus, and the re- 
mainder are for the most part South American. They are in the main 
small plants, similar in habit to the European species, but the fronds 
of IV. guatemalensis are sometimes as much as a foot-and-a-half in length. 
The genus was established by Robert Brown in 1813, and was named by 
him in compliment to Joseph Woods, a well-known British botanist. 
WOODSIA HYPERBOREA, Brown. 
This is one of the smallest rock species. It possesses a densely-tufted caudex, or stock, 
very short, thickly set with the brown, persistent, erect bases of the fallen fronds, and giving 
off many long filamentous black roots. The fronds are few and of small size, varying in 
length from one-and-a-half inches to as much as five inches in luxuriant specimens ; the 
stipes is rather stout for the size of the frond, stiff, reddish, and shining, and sparsely 
provided with small, scattered, elongated or hair-like yellowish-brown paleas. At a point 
rather more than half an inch from the base is a joint in the stipes, at which point the frond 
when withered breaks away, leaving the lower part of the stipes attached to the caudex ; 
this remains for a long period, and the numerous stiff, abruptly-broken-off stumps give a 
characteristic appearance to the plant. The frond is narrow and oblong, sometimes almost 
linear, in outline, and somewhat suddenly narrows into the rather blunt point ; the pinnae are 
few in number, small, one-fourth to three-eighths of an inch in length, sessile, often distantly 
placed and never overlapping, generally somewhat bluntly ovate-triangular in outline, but 
deeply cut into a few short, obtuse, rounded lobes or segments, which are in the lowest 
pinnae faintly crenate at the base. In colour the fronds are pale bright green, often with 
a rusty or yellowish tint. There are usually some scattered hairs on the back and margins. 
The sori are copiously produced, and are at first quite distinct from one another, but they 
often become afterwards confluent, and then appear to cover the whole back of the frond. 
Under a lens the sporangia appear to be mixed up with, and partially covered by, long 
curved hairs, and it is not until the former are carefully removed that a close examination 
can show that the origin of the hairs is really the margin of the indicium. This membrane 
occupies here the unusual position of being quite beneath the sorus ; it is small and completely 
concealed by the sporangia, but its margin is produced into numerous long, pointed, faintly- 
partitioned hair-like processes, which spread out all round and curve up round the margin 
of the sorus overlapping the sporangia. These capillary processes are so like the ordinary 
hairs on the surface of the frond that their different nature was for a long while un- 
suspected, and only made clear by the lucid exposition of Brown and the beautiful drawings 
of Francis Bauer.* The sporangia themselves are shortly stalked, and are not supported on 
any common receptacle ; they present no special peculiarity. 
* “Transactions of the Linnean Society ’ for 1816 (vol. xi. 1 . 
