THE FERNS OF SOUTH AFRICA 
45 
The South African fern allies are included in most of the 
South African books already mentioned, and were described, 
along with those from other parts of the world, by Spring, in 
Vols. 15 and 24 of Memoir es de V Academie royale de Belgique 
(1842 and 1849), and again carefully monographed by Baker 
in his Handbook of Fern Allies (1887), m which 562 species 
are described, separated into 1 1 genera, and 5 orders. Of 
these, only 22 species are known to be South African, and 10 
are found nowhere else. Christensen’s Index Filicum includes 
the Salviniaceae and Marsileaceae. 
In the preparation of the following pages, almost all the 
above works have been consulted, and collated with live 
plants or with dried specimens. The collection in the Cape 
Government Herbarium is almost complete, including many 
collected by Ecklon and Zeyher, Drege, Dr Pappe, Rawson, 
and Lady Barkly, as well as numerous additions from most 
recent collectors. 
The Bolus Herbarium has also a very complete set, and 
the collections in the Natal Government Herbarium, Albany 
Herbarium, Transvaal Museum Herbarium, and my own, as 
well as several other private herbaria, are almost complete 
as local collections. These have been examined as oppor- 
tunity occurred, and through the kindness of those in charge 
I have been able to examine later additions recently. 
Several large collections of South African plants have 
been numbered and distributed, most of which contain some 
ferns. 
Among these, Burchell’s is about the earliest, and as they 
were distributed with numbers corresponding to his Geo- 
graphical Catalogue , which were later arranged in MS. by 
the late Dr Bolus, the locality for any specimen can still be 
traced. 
Drege’s collections were also distributed, as were the 
collections of Ecklon and Zeyher, which had the localities 
numbered corresponding with a list of localities in Linnaea , 
Vol. 19. 
The collections of Krauss and Dr Rehmann (1875 — 1880) 
were distributed with localities on the labels, as also have 
