THE LADY FERN. : 21 
The Lady Fern does not appear to be applied to any important 
use. It is, however, frequently employed in packing both fish and 
fruit for transmission to market, and is even more suitable for this 
purpose than the bracken which is sometimes made use of in a 
similar way. 
What is wanting in utility is however amply compensated by its 
beauty, for the plant is undoubtedly pre-eminent among our native 
ferns in this rare quality ; and as such, has elicited from poets' pens 
the very highest praise. Thus Calder Campbell, in some lines 
written for Miss Pratt’s volume, on The Ferns of Great Britain and 
their Allies : 
** Go look for the Pimpernel by day, 
For Silene’s flowers by night ; 
For the first loves to bask in the sunny ray, 
And the last woos the moon’s soft light + 
But day or night the Lady Fern 
May catch and charm your eyes, 
When the sun to gold her emeralds turns, 
Or the moon lends her silver dyes, 
But seek her not in early May, 
For a Sibyl then she looks, 
With wrinkled fronds that seem to say, 
“Shut up are my wizard books !’ 
"Then search for her in the summer woods, 
Where rills keep moist the ground, 
Where Foxgloves from their spotted hoods, 
Shake pilfering insects round ; 
Where up and elambering all about, 
The Traveller's Joy flings forth 
Tts snowy awns, that in and out 
Like feathers strew the earth : 
Fair are the tufts of Meadow-sweet 
That haply blossom nigh ; 
Fair are the whorls of violet 
Prunella shows hard. by ; 
But nor by burn, in wood, or vale, 
Grows anything so fair 
As the plumy crest of emerald pale, 
That waves in the wind, and soughs in the gale, 
Of the Lady Fern, when the sunbeams turn 
To gold her delicate hair.” 
We include in what we have taken as the. typical form of Filiz- 
femina, the plants known sometimes as the varieties molle and 
trifidum, these being the commoner moderately developed forms in 

