Cryptogames Vasculaires du Brésil

Abstract

PROFESSOR FEE is by many years the oldest amongst living fern-authors. He has held for more than a quarter of a century the chair of botany at Strasburg, and has concentrated his attention principally upon ferns and the other allied higher orders of cryptogamic plants. He published a general treatise upon the classification of the order as long ago as 1844, ancl since then many consecutive years have never passed without producing some memoir upon the subject from his fertile pen. Having recently received a fine collection of ferns from Dr. Glaziou, the superintendent of the Botanic Gardens at Rio Janeiro, he has been stimulated to add one more memoir to the series, and that is the work now before us. All the series of his monographs, several of which are in folio, are illustrated beautifully and copiously, not only with full-sized figures of the plants, but also with careful magnified analytical details; and together they form by far the most extensive and excellent series of fern-plates which anyone upon the Continent has published. The present memoir is quite upon a par with its predecessors in this respect. It is in quarto, and contains seventy-eight quarto plates and a list of all the ferns and fern-allies known to the author as inhabiting Brazil, with a list of special stations, but with descriptions of novelties only. But there is one drawback to the value of Fée's works, and that is a very great one. Living at a distance from the great metropolitan herbaria, our author has apparently worked almost entirely upon his own private collections, and has continually failed to recognise well-known plants, and has made new species in great numbers out of the specimens which his correspondents have sent him, which no one else has been able to understand as such. In none of his works—we have no alternative but to say—has this tendency been carried to a greater excess than in the present one. For Brazil alone he describes and figures in the present memoir upwards of 180 new species, so-called. These are not from tracts of country which the collectors whose gatherings have been already reported upon have not visited, or have left unexplored, but nearly all from the vicinity of the capital, and from the gatherings of Glaziou. Now the neighbourhood of Rio Janeiro is exceedingly rich in ferns; but there is, perhaps, no other part of Tropical America from which herbaria, both in England and on the Continent, have been more bountifully supplied. The consequence is, that out of this 180 we do not think that more than from twelve to twenty species are really newj in any sense in which we understand in this country what is meant by a species. For instance, we have some seven or eight species elaborately characterised and figured from what cannot be called anything else than so many individual fronds of that most cosmopolitan of ferns, our common English Aspidium or Polystichum aculeatum. Or, to take one of the exclusively Brazilian species, Cyathea Gardneri, a very distinct tree-fern, is included in the list under five different names—Gardneri (Dr. Gardner's number on which Hooker described the species quoted), incurvata (a name of Kunze's published in the Linnæa from Regnell's specimens), mamillata, taunaysiana and attenuata, the last three new species here named and figured for the first time; but the figures, beautiful as they are, might, any of them, have been drawn from Gardner's specimens. The author does not seem to have any knowledge of numerous English and German books and papers in which Tropical American ferns are described, as for instance, Grisebach's excellent Flora of the British West Indies; and this leads to further name-crossing. In short, although one cannot but admire the excellence and the copiousness of the illustrations in these memoirs, and ought not to leave out of sight the example of devotedness to science which they show, expenditure of time devoted to one object through a long course of years, and of money, only a very small, proportion of which their sale can possibly repay, yet still the predominant feeling on the mind must needs be that to deal with plants in this way has a direct tendency to bring species-botany at a very rapid rate into a state of utter confusion.

Cryptogames Vasculaires du Brésil.

Par Prof. A. L. Fée avec le concours de Monsieur le Dr. Glaziou. Pp. 268, 4to., 78 Plates. (Paris: Baillière.)