36 
CHOICE BRITISH PERNS. 
is a remarkable fact tbat not a single cbance-sown plant 
bas made its appearance amongst the innumerable seedlings 
of other Ferns which spring np in profusion under identical 
circumstances. Again, this Fern, which, from its unique and 
unmistakable form, is fitted admirably for our illustration, 
was found wild as long ago as 1861, shortly after which, 
being, as we have demonstrated, a remarkably fertile plant, 
it was propagated from its spores, and distributed all over 
the country, so that, at the present date, plants as fertile 
as the parent exist in every collection, even the most humble. 
This being so, we would naturally expect that escaped spores 
from some of these cultivated plants would have yielded 
apparently wild ones ; yet, in the course of twenty-seven years, 
not a single new find of that form has been recorded. 
Our readers would naturally jump to the conclusion, from 
the foregoing remarks, that the Victoria Lady Fern is 
especially difficult to raise from its spores artificially, instead 
of which, if the spores be sown with ordinary care, and pro- 
tected fom disturbance, they germinate freely and produce 
abundance of plants, all of the parental type. It is manifest 
from this that, in some subtle way, the spores of this Fern 
are more heavily handicapped, under natural conditions, in 
their early stages of development, than other abnormal forms 
of the Lady Fern, which become veritable weeds under pre- 
cisely the same conditions of growth. 
It will have been gathered from the foregoing remarks 
that there must be some essential difference between these 
spores and the seeds produced by flowering plants. In the 
first place, a seed is the resulting product of a fertilised 
flower, and, when sown, the immediate offspring is a plant 
like the parent, and capable of producing flowers in its turn- 
Place, for instance, a mustard seed in the ground, and very 
speedily it splits open, a root protrudes and penetrates the 
soil, and immediately thereafter two little leaves expand, and 
a mustard plant is before us without further change. The 
Fern spore, however, differs by not being the product of fer- 
tilisation; nor does it produce directly a plant anything like 
the parent, but another kind of plant altogether, resembling 
