
THE BROAD PRICKLY-TOOTHED BUCKLER FERN. 245 
pigmy character, so that the fronds are very diverse. The plant is 
constant to these features, and is an ornamental dwarf form of the 
species. It was found in Cant Clough, near Todmorden, Lancashire, 
by Mr. A. Stansfield, who describes it as very dwarf, constant, and 
beautiful. 
20. pygmea (M.). Another pigmy form, found by Mr. Stansfield 
in the same locality with the foregoing. It is also constant to its 
peculiarities; of which the chief are that the stipes or rachis is 
ramose; the pinne scarcely bipinnate, the lowest pinnules only 
and these only at the base of the frond being separate, the rest 
irregularly confluent and divided into crowded lobes, of irregular 
shape, having unequal bristle-tipped serratures. It is a curious 
dwarf variety. 
21. angustipinnula (M.). This is a curious form, depauperated to a 
certain extent and yet hardly affecting its symmetry. The fronds 
appear to be normally oblong-lanceolate in outline, upwards of a 
foot in height, with the pinne rather distant below ; they are dis- 
tinctly bipinnate. The pinnules stand apart, and are mostly of linear 
outline, the usual oblong outline being narrowed by the lobes being 
all and nearly equally depauperately shortened throughout; fre- 
quently the basal anterior one is elongated like an auricle, but the 
rest are nearly. uniform, and short. The pinnules are consequently 
linear (nearly an inch long), with the margins unequally incise- 
serrate. In the upper part of the frond, the pinnules become 
abbreviated into irregular roundish lobes, but with a certain degree 
of uniformity in size. This plant, if it remains true to these pecu- 
liarities, will be a very remarkable variation of the monstrous or 
depauperated class. In some fronds produced by the same plant 
the following season to that in which those previously described 
were formed, the same general character was preserved, only the 
symmetry was lost, some of the lower pinnules being, like the 
upper, abbreviated and roundish, instead of linear. It was found by 
Mr. R. Morris, we believe somewhere in Lancashire. A similar plant 
to this has been obtained by Mr. Willison of Whitby, Yorkshire, 
who has sent it under the name of cystopteroides ; it has the same 
general character as angustipinnula, but the pinnules are scarcely so 
much narrowed as in the fronds above described. [Plate XLIX B.] 

