A FERN VALLEY 
65 
afford a congenial home for the rock-loving members of the 
flowerless family. On eacli hillside above the streamlet many 
a broad platform of earth or rock would afford space for 
creeping Brake or clustering Polypody, whilst on many a 
craggy point and in many a moist and sheltered nook con- 
genial habitats might he found for the Fern of the open cliff 
and of the dripping cave. 
In such a glen or valley, with a climate of moisture and 
heat, the Ferns of the tropics, forgetting that they were no 
longer in the humid depths of primeval forests, would unroll 
their great glossy fronds and rise to a height unknown with- 
out the limits of their extemporized world. The Maidenhair 
would no longer miss the air of the sea-coast, and the glossy- 
fronded Asplenium marinum would develop as grandly as it 
could in its wild and dripping rocky cavern. 
Now let it not be supposed that the picture thus drawn of 
a Fern valley represents but the dream of an enthusiast. 
There is many a glen in lovely Devonshire alone, provided by 
the unbounded wealth of Nature with craggy rock and 
sparkling stream, clothed and fringed with their native flora. 
Such glens in summer are veritable paradises, though the 
cold of our winters cuts low the verdant crowns of foliage 
which charm us as they wave in the summer breeze. But a 
protecting canopy of glass would, in the summer, change the 
conditions of the plant-life of the glen from those of our 
temperate clime to the climate of the tropics ; and in the 
winter — by the use of means for artificially keeping a tem- 
perature, during the prevalence of our frosts, of say some 
sixty or seventy degrees of heat — would maintain and 
promote the growth of the inhabitants of what would, in 
truth, be a little sub-tropical Fern world. When it is remem- 
bered what has already been done in this country in the 
direction of raising huge fabrics of glass, it must be admitted 
that our suggested Fern valley need not be an impossibility 
