PE BN HUNTING. 
INTRODUCTION. 
The study of Ferns can be pursued in three different ways. 
It may he pursued in the chamber of a botanical recluse, 
with the aid of every scientific appliance, and with an abun- 
dant supply of dried plants, with their fronds, caudices, and 
rootlets. It may be pursued in the Fern house or garden, or 
over that microcosm of the Fern world, the case, or pot. 
Each of these ways of following this study is interesting and 
instructive. 
There is, however, yet another way of pursuing this 
delightful study, and that is, in the home of the Ferns. Per- 
haps the severe votary of science may object to the proposal 
to associate Fern hunting with ‘ study/ It is too frequently 
the custom of our botanical writers to describe with pains- 
taking minuteness only the structure and peculiarities of the 
organs of plants — to present to us, in short, the ‘ dry bones ’ 
of organography, but to tell us nothing of the life of plants. 
They give us a fragment of dried rootstock and frond or leaf, 
but will not provide any colouring, even as a background or 
as a framework to their picture. 
By Fern hunting, we do not mean the mere search for 
‘botanical specimens’ of Ferns, to be secured merely as an 
aid to the mastering of the technology of cryptogamic 
botany. We would have the expression to bear a much 
wider meaning. To the lover of Nature, it will suggest not 
