Ferns of South Africa. 
23 
New species have been described in various journals, including, 
“Journal of Botany” (July, 1874), and “Gardener’s Chronicle” 
(Nov. 1 6th, 1889), and now, all additions to, or alterations on, the 
2nd edition of Hooker and Baker’s “Synopsis Filicum,” have 
been brought together by Mrs. Baker in “ Annals of Botany ” 
(1891). 
The South African fern allies are included in most of the 
South African books already mentioned, and were described, along 
with those from other parts of the world, by Spring, in Vols. 15 and 
24 of “Memoirs de l’Academie royale de Belgique” (1842 and 
1849), an d again carefully monographed by Mr. Baker in his 
“Handbook of Fern Allies (1887), in which 562 species are de- 
scribed, separated into 1 1 genera, and 5 orders. Of these, only 
22 species are known to be South African, and 10 are found nowhere 
else. 
In the preparation of the following pages, almost all the above 
works have been consulted, and collated with live plants, or with 
dried specimens. The collection in the Cape Government 
Herbarium is almost complete, including many collected by 
Ecklon and Zeyher, Drege, Dr. Pappe, Rawson, and Lady 
Barkly, as well as numerous additions from most recent collectors. 
Mr. Bolus has also a very complete set, and the collections in 
the Natal Government Herbarium, Albany Herbarium, and my 
own, as well as several other private herbaria, are almost complete 
as local collections. 
Several large collections of South African plants have been 
numbered and distributed, most of which contain some ferns. 
Among these, Burchell’s is about the earliest, and as they were 
distributed with numbers corresponding to his “Geographical 
Catalogue,” and which have since been arranged in MSS. by Mr. 
Bolus, the locality for any specimen can still be traced. 
Drege’s collections were also distributed, as were the collections 
of Ecklon and Zeyher, which had the localities numbered corre- 
sponding with a list of localities in “Linnaea,” vol. 19. 
The collections of Krauss, and Dr. Rehmann (1875-1880), 
were distributed with localities on the labels, as also have been the 
