73 
stalk is short, thickened, and wide at the base, with dark 
tipped brown scales. The frond is bipinnate, and grows 
erect, one or two feet high, sometimes more. Its appear- 
ance, though graceful, is never so fine and luxuriant as that 
of the preceding species. The rachis and stalk is four-sided, 
somewhat transparent, and often tinged with a reddish 
colour. The lower pinnae frequently bend downward, and 
the higher ones upward, with a slight tendency near the 
summit to turn back. The leaflets, owing to the edge curl- 
ing back, appear quite linear, but if they were expanded, 
it would be found that they are wider at the base, where 
there is a jutting out of the side, and after that jutting out, 
that they then taper to the extremity, and are, in fact, tri- 
angular. They have no distinct stalk, but a broad attach- 
ment, and are distant from one another. When the covers 
of the fruit disappear, the clusters are almost round, and 
spread over nearly the whole of the under surface. This 
grows in more exposed situations, in our wet commons 
rather than our woods and sheltered hedge-banks. 
3. Plumous Lady Fern. I^lumosum, Elegant as the Lady 
Fern always is, this variety is still more elegant and graceful 
than the other Ferns of the species. Though the fronds 
are frequently very large, yet nature has so adjusted all its 
parts, so neatly divided every portion of the leaflets, given 
it such a soft green colour, and so raised it in an erect 
position without being stiff and awkward, that we may pro- 
nounce it the fairest of the fair. If it could be imagined 
that the King Fern, the Eoyal Flowering Fern, Osmunda 
Kegalis, should select any other as the object of his choice, 
and make her his bride, this surely he would fix upon and 
in this he would delight. The root-stock is very large. 
The stalk or leafless part is a fourth the length of the frond. 
The rachis or mid-stem is woody. The frond is egg-shaped 
or broadly lance-shaped and tripinnate, as the lowest pin- 
nules or leaflets of some of the lower pinnse are subdivided 
into little leaves. The rachis of a pinna is sometimes waved 
and often of a purple colour. Some pinnae are nearly a foot 
long. The leaflets are much more deeply toothed than in 
the variety incisum. Several of the finer ones are two 
inches long. The covers run nearly in a straight line. The 
clusters of fruit are in the slit, and their position is by no 
