144 
BRAKE, OR BRACKEN. 
even fifteen feet below the ground. The fronds appear 
as soon as the frosts are over, coming up in little curls 
like shepherds’ crooks, or croziers; sometimes like 
little grey-green downy hooks stuck into the grass, the 
upper part of the stipes not yet having burst the sur¬ 
face. The young stipes is downy and soft, growing 
angular and hard in age, spindle-shaped at the base. 
The fronds, erroneously said sometimes to be three- 
branched, are truly bipinnate, or tripinnate when very 
luxuriant, the pinnse standing opposite in pairs, each 
pair in succession becoming fully developed while the 
main rachis is extending upward and the next pair is 
beginning to unfold. It is only when the plant is 
very poor that the fronds appear three-branched, the 
development of the lower pair of branches not leaving 
the plant energy enough to carry up its rachis and 
produce the other pairs of pinnae which it would nor¬ 
mally possess. The true habit of the plant is still 
more clearly shown when it attains its fullest luxu¬ 
riance, the full-grown fronds then consisting merely 
of a series of pairs of branches from bottom to top. 
The unrolling of the young fronds is very curious, and 
well worthy of watchful notice. 
The bipinnate branches, or pinnae, are in general 
ovate slightly elongated, their pinnae (the secondary 
pinnae) narrowly lanceolate. These last are placed 
rather closely together, and again divided into a series 
of pinnules, which are either undivided and attached 
to the rachis by their stalkless base with a line of 
spore-cases along each margin, or become larger and 
then more elongated and deeply pinnatifid with the 
