90 
NATURE STUDY. 
snakes as well as men. One day the glass cage which he called 
(or might have called) home was placed in too much sun with 
too little water inside and at night Ebenezer was dead. His 
loss caused real regret, for his pretty colors and gentle and in¬ 
teresting ways had dispelled in more then one person that unrea¬ 
sonable and foundationless horror of all kinds of snakes, that 
are mostly harmless, shy and beautiful. 
Ferns and Fern Allies. II. 
BY FREDERICK W. BATCHELDER. 
When Asa Gray was a young man he was in the habit of 
testing his powers of observation in various ways For exam¬ 
ple : when tramping through a wood he tried to distinguish the 
different kinds of trees by the bark alone with the result that he 
was before long able to name all the species without seeing 
either leaves, flowers or fruit. This was a reduction of the data 
for diagnosis to the lowest terms. Neither was the method 
altogether a negative one. Any object to be distinguished from 
other objects must have some individual character of its own. 
It is one thing to know all about a given species of plants and 
quite another to know enough about it to tell what it is not. 
Yet even the latter bit of knowledge is better than none, for it 
invariably begets the desire to know more. So I do not hesi- 
fig. i. The Osmundas are so very abundant that one 
does not have to search long to find them all. There is no dif¬ 
ficulty in distinguishing them in spring or early summer by the 
methods of fruiting, O. regalis bearing the fruit at the summit of 
the leaf, Claytoniana in the middle, and cinnamomea having an 
entire leaf changed into fruit. After the fruiting portionsTave 
