THOUGHTS AND MEMORANDA UPON FERNS. 
Ferns, as favourite objects of interest with the botanist 
and with the lover of plant culture, begin to take their place 
both in the border and in the garden-house, and are no longer 
excluded from that station among domesticated 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 
their own tribes from all antiquity, in their great importance 
to this country as constituting a considerable part of coal, 
and also in their botanical structure. We may look upon a 
Fern, as upon a work fresh from the hand of the eternal 
Creator, for no attempt to hybridise the species has succeeded ; 
and we feel that we are carried back to the beginning/and that 
we see each kind the same as it was then — the “deshe,” or 
“sprouting plant ” of Gen. i. 11, 12. — an unchanged and un- 
changing link of time between the present and all the past. 
And this interest becomes with us, in this country, yet greater, 
when we are reminded, that we stand and look upon the 
Ferns of a temperate clime, flourishing upon a soil which 
contains the entombed remains of vast tribes of the same 
plants, once abundant on the same localities, but natives of 
warmer regions ; that during the immeasurable periods of the 
