European Ferns. 
73 
and many of his drawings of plants are also in the British Museum. It was in his honour 
that Linnaeus named the familiar and beautiful genus Camellia, Camellus being the Latinised 
form of his name. Many of the earlier Catholic missionaries were also acute naturalists, 
and found time to combine with their spiritual labours a careful investigation of the fauna 
and flora of the — then almost, if not quite, unknown — regions to which they were sent by 
their superiors. For example, Louveiro, while employed as a missionary, investigated the 
botany of Cochin China; his work upon the subject (published in 1712) being still our principal 
authority on the plants of that region. It is to Kamel that we owe the introduction of the 
drug known, in compliment to the founder of the Society of Jesus, as St. Ignatius’s Bean 
( Strychnos Ignatii) ; this he collected in Manila, sending specimens to Ray and Petiver, which 
were laid by them before the Royal Society of London in 1C99 ; other plants of economic 
value were also introduced by him to the knowledge of European savants. 
Woodwardia orientalis is, as we have said, not always proliferous, although this is very 
usually the case. The species attains a great size in Formosa, where the fronds are three or 
four feet long. Our cut (taken from a specimen in the Sloane collection) shows a pinna with 
the young plants springing from it, and also a small portion of the same enlarged. 
WOODWARDIA RADICANS, Sin. 
This handsome plant, the type of the genus, was known to Linnaeus, by whom it was 
described under the name of Blechnum radicans. It is a large fern, with gracefully arching 
pinnate fronds from four to six feet long — in favoured localities in California it attains a 
length of from eight to ten feet — the stipes of each being densely scaly at the base and 
smooth above; they are somewhat thick in texture. The pinnae are lanceolate and distant, 
the lower being often a foot or nearly so in length, deeply pinnatifid, and narrowed towards 
the apex into a long tail-like point ; the segments are almost entire, but oftener minutely 
and sometimes conspicuously serrate, especially towards the apex, which often terminates in 
a bristle-like point. The veins are reticulate or netted, there being a single row of meshes 
(areoles) outside the sori. These latter are parallel with the mid-vein of each segment of the 
pinnule ; they are short and oblong in form, and covered with a thick involucre of the 
same shape, which is usually persistent, and closes like a lid over the sori. 
Towards the top of the rachis, at the base of one or more of the pinnae, may be 
noticed a conspicuous mass of brown scales, which is indicated in our (necessarily much 
reduced) coloured plate as a small brown spot. In the accompanying woodcut this is shown 
of its natural size : it is, in fact, a bud, which is capable of reproducing the plant. The 
young fern arising from this will put out fronds while still attached to the parent plant ; 
Mr. Lowe* says “it is not at all uncommon to see plants with half-a-dozen fronds a foot long, 
receiving all their support from the parent leaf.” We can hardly go so far as this 
from actual experience, but it is certainly by no means unfrequent to see young plants 
attached to the parent frond after the manner shown in the cut. It will be noticed that the 
position in which these scaly buds are produced is quite different from that in which the young 
plants occur in Woodwardia orientalis, already referred to; in that species they grow from the 
upper side of the segments of the pinna;, whereas here they occur on the rachis. In Prof. 
Eaton’s handsome work on the “Ferns of North America,” the author speaks of this as a 
“Ferns British and Exotic,” vol. iv., t. 108. 
