'EW VORt 
NIC'A/ 
THOUGHTS AND MEMORANDA UPON FERNS. 
Ferns, the favourite objects of interest with the lover of 
plant-culture as well as with the botanist, take their place 
both in our borders and garden houses, and are no longer 
excluded from that prominent position among flowering 
plants which they ever hold in the wild state. By this 
attention to Ferns, the cultivator is greatly the gainer; for 
who is not conscious of a deficiency even in a roadside 
bank that is destitute of Ferns ? Independently of beauty, 
gracefulness, and variety of form, and of long continuance 
in vigour through the summer season, Ferns possess 
peculiar interest, both in their identity with the tribes of 
antiquity which were chosen to supply a considerable part 
of Coal, and also in their botanical structure. We look 
upon a Fern as upon a work fresh from the hand of the 
Eternal Creator, for, I believe, no attempt to hybridize the 
species has succeeded * ; and we are carried back to the 
“ Beginning,” and see it the same as it was then — the 
“deshe,” or “ sprouting plant ” of Gen. i. 11. 12 — an un- 
*In his paper, read at the meeting of the British Association for the 
advancement of Science, at Dundee, in 1867, Mr. Lowe observed, “ It has 
been said that the fern Asplenium microdon is a hybrid between Asplenium 
marinum and lanceolatum — that Lastrea remota is a hybrid between L. 
spinulosa and filix mas ; and that perhaps Asplenium germanicum is a hybrid 
between A. septentrionale and ruta muraria. Now it does not appear that 
these ferns have ever been reproduced from their spores — whereas the varieties 
raised from species can readily be reproduced by spores : ” but no proof of 
hybridization in these cases is given. The capsules and spores of Swiss 
specimens of Asplenium germanicum are better developed than other speci- 
mens in my possession from the Minto Rocks, from Germany, or elsewhere : 
the fronds also are more vigorous, and the pinnae broader and more distinctly 
trifid. A glance at the group of Asplenia, to which this species belongs, 
would suggest many a hybrid, if the possession by a species of characters 
common to two other species were admitted as proof of mixture. 
