
CHAPTER I 
BRITISH FERNS AS A HOBBY 
ТнккЕ are hobbies and hobbies, and these may be divided into 
two kinds—natural hobbies, or those which deal with the products 
of Nature, and artificial hobbies, or those which deal with man’s own 
productions, and of these two the palm must undoubtedly be 
accorded to the first. To the hobbies devoted to human work 
there is an inevitable limit, and many are governed by purely 
artificial tastes which not infrequently impute great value to 
really worthless things solely on account of their rarity or difficulty 
of acquisition. With the natural hobby, on the other hand, which 
deals with Nature’s creations, every branch of study which is 
taken up is soon seen to be inexhaustible, and every thoroughgoing 
student becomes in time a specialist. Thus in Oliver Wendell 
Holmes’s Autocrat of the Breakfast Table we find the so-called “ ento- 
mologist " repudiating the term as far too comprehensive, and even 
confining his study of the beetle family to one section, claiming but 
to be а scarabeist. Turning again to the artificial hobby, apart 
from its inevitable shallowness, where is the “ curio,” the rare 
edition, rendered precious, perhaps, by a misprint, that can be 
multiplied ad infinitum it desired, as, to stick to our subject, 
a rare fern find can be, which, quite possibly, in addition may 
spontaneously endow the finder with “ editions de luxe” as well 
under selective cultivation. The writer, to take a concrete example 
of the growth of a natural hobby, started some thirty years ago as 
a Fernist, owing to a stray spore of a Doodia caudata, a small 
growing exotic Fern, developing into a plant under a glass shade 
containing a fine specimen of Selaginella, the study of which Fern 
was so interesting as to induce the acquisition of a few more ex- 
otics, and the provision of a Wardian case in which, by pure chance, 
a British crested Lady Fern appeared. Not long after that the 
specialist tendency induced the gift of all the exotics so far 
acquired to a friend, and, about that time, the British Fern fever 
was severely caught by an original find on Exmoor of a new variety 
of the Hard Fern, Blechnum spicant concinnum Отиегуи. Spore- 
raising resulted in the discovery of proliferous, or bud-bearing 
5 



