




206 THE BRITISH FERNS. 
persistent, convex, roundish-reniform, 4. e., round with a posterior 
sinus or notch, by which it is affixed, furnished both on the surface 
and at the margin with stalked glands. ^ Spore-cases numerous, 
brown, obovate. Spores roundish oblong, granulated. 
Duration. The caudex is perennial. The fronds are annual, 
produced in spring and perishing in autumn. 
This species may be known from those to which it is most nearly 
allied by several characteristics. The fronds are comparatively 
small, and generally broadest at the base, and they are always 
covered with minute glands, which give off a pleasant balsamic 
fragrance, often appreciable in the vicinity of the living plants 
during sunshine. The outline of the pinnules, which are bluntly 
oblong with shallow lobes, differing in this respect from the other 
native species of the genus, is most nearly approached by some states 
of the Incised Male-Fern, and the serratures also, as in that, are 
not at all spinulose or awn-tipped, but are short and merely acute ; 
it is, however, distinguished from that by its size, its outline, its 
glandular surface, and its glandular-fringed indusium. It can 
hardly be mistaken for any other of the Lastreas, nearly all the 
rest of which have spinulose serratures. 
This species is local in its range, being almost entirely confined, 
as far as regards the United Kingdom, to a few limestone craggy 
mountainous tracts “within a small area in the approximating 
portions of the counties of Westmoreland, Lancaster, and York.” 
The Rev. G. Pinder writes *—* I met with Lastrea rigida in great 
profusion along the whole of the great scar limestone district, at 
intervals between Arnside Knot, where itis comparatively scarce, and 
Ingleborough, being most abundant on Hutton Roof Crags and 
Farlton Knot, where it grows in the deep fissures of the natural 
platform, and occasionally high in the clefts of the rocks; it is 
generally much shattered by the winds, or cropped by the sheep, 
which seem to be fond of it. With regard to the shape of the 
frond, I may mention that among some hundreds of specimens, I 
* Newman, History of British Ferns, 2d ed. 192. 

