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 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 are carried back to the beginning, and see each kind the 
same as it was then—the “ deshe, j; or “sprouting plant of 
Gen. i. 11, 12—an unchanged and unchanging link of time 
between the present and all the past. And this interest be¬ 
comes with us, in this country, yet greater, when we are 
reminded, that we stand and look upon the Ferns of a tem¬ 
perate clime, flourishing upon a soil which contains the 
entombed remains of vast tribes of the same plants, once 
abundant on the same localities, b.ut natives of warmer regions; 
that during the immeasurable periods of the formation of coal, 
