9i 
APPENDIX, 
I N the body of this book we have been at some pains to avoid 
technicalities and the purely scientific side of Fern study. 
For the benefit of those, however, who may care to dip 
a little deeper into the life history of Ferns, and for the 
purpose of bringing the record of elicited facts up to the 
end of the nineteenth century, we will now give some details of 
the normal and abnormal modes of reproduction which have 
been discovered up to the present. 
In the first place, then, Ferns differ essentially from flowering 
plants, in the important respect that no detached seeds are 
produced, and that the existence of a seed is preluded by that 
of a spore. The spores, which are found on the backs of, or 
elsewhere on, the fronds, as already described, are minute bodies 
consisting of a cell protected by a husk or hard skin, and differ 
from a seed in the essential fact that they are not the product 
of a fertilisation, and do not therefore contain the embryo first leaf 
or leaves conjoined with an embryo root with which a seed 
proper is furnished. A seed thus constituted has simply to be 
sown under congenial conditions of warmth and moisture in order 
to swell, protrude a root, burst its shell, expand its first leaf 
or leaves, and then become a plant of the parental type. The 
process is direct and simple. The spore, however* has a 
roundabout course to pursue to achieve its end, i.e., the 
production of a spore- bearing Fern like that from which it 
was shed. To elucidate this process we refer to the series of 
self-explanatory illustrations herewith given, and especially to 
that marvellous set which we reproduce from the original 
drawings of Count Suminski at the time of the first full 
demonstration of the normal life-history of Ferns, the final 
link of which he discovered in 1846. From these pictures 
it will be seen that the first product of the spore is a little 
row of green cells, which, after forming a tiny club-shaped leaf, 
stops growing at the apex, and by lateral expansion forms a 
heart-shaped primary leaf or “ prothallus.” Upon the under 
side of this as it develops a large number of root-hairs 
appear, and scattered among these are a number of small bullet- 
