Nephrodium Goldianum, Hooker & Greville, Ic. Fil. t. cii.—Hooker, Sp. Fil., iv., p. 121.—Hooker & Baker, Syn. Fil., p. 272.

Lastrea Goldiana, Presl, Tent. Pterid., p. 76.—Lawson, in Canad. Nat. i., p. 282.

Dryopteris Goldiana, Gray, Manual, ed. i., p. 631.

Aspidium Filix-mas, Pursh, Fl. Am. Sept., ii., p. 662.

Hab.—Deep, rocky woods, from Canada and Maine to Indiana, Virginia and Kentucky. It is also named in local catalogues of the flora of Wisconsin and Kansas. Not known in the Old World.

Description:—The root-stock is creeping or ascending, several inches long, and nearly an inch thick. This thickness is made up, in considerable part, by the adherent bases of old stalks; the stalks being perfectly continuous with the root-stock, and so much crowded as to overlap each other. When fresh the root-stock is fleshy, and a longitudinal section of it shows that its substance passes so gradually into that of the stalk-bases, that no point of separation or distinction between the two can be selected. This kind of root-stock is found also in Aspidium spinulosum and its allies, in A. Filix-mas, A. cristatum, A. marginale, A. Nevadense, A. fragrans, and A. rigidum, and in very many exotic species, and it is very unlike the root-stocks of A. Thelypteris, A. Noveboracense, and A. unitum, species which have been already described and figured in the present work. The parenchymatous portion of the root-stock is loaded with starch in very minute grains, as may be easily proved by adding a drop of alcoholic solution of iodine to a thin slice of the root-stock placed under a microscope, when the grains will be presently seen to turn blue, the recognized sign of starch. This abundance of nutritive material in the root-stock enables it to send up a fine circle of large fronds in the proper season of the year.

The stalks are from nine to fifteen inches long, rather stout, green when living, but straw-color when dried for the herbarium, in which condition they are furrowed in front and along the two sides. At the base they are covered with large ovate-acuminate brown or sometimes dark and shining scales. Mixed in with these are smaller and narrower chaffy scales, which also are found along the whole length of the stalk and the rachis. The cross-section of the stalk shows two rather large roundish fibro-vascular bundles on the anterior side, and three, the middle one largest, at the back.

Several fronds are usually seen growing from a root-stock, those produced early in the season commonly sterile, and shorter than the others. The full-grown and fertile fronds are often two feet or two and a half feet long, and about one foot broad. The general outline is oblong-ovate, the lowest pinnÆ being scarcely, if at all, shorter than those in the middle of the frond. There are usually about eight or ten full-sized pinnÆ each side of the rachis, besides the gradually diminishing pinnÆ near the acute pinnatifid apex. The larger pinnÆ are from five to eight inches long, the middle ones an inch or an inch and a half wide, but the lowest ones two inches and a half broad. The greatest breadth of the pinnÆ is usually near the middle or even a little above the middle, so that they are slightly narrowed towards the base; and in this character lies one of the readiest distinctions between this fern and those large forms of A. cristatum, which have occasionally been mistaken for A. Goldianum; for in that other species the greatest breadth of the pinnÆ is uniformly at the base.

The segments of the pinnÆ are from fifteen to twenty each side the midrib: the incisions do not extend quite to the midrib, so that the latter is narrowly winged, and the pinnÆ are pinnatifid rather than pinnate. The segments are from nine to eighteen lines long, and about three lines wide: they are set rather obliquely on the midrib, and are often slightly curved upwards, or falcate. They are obtuse or somewhat acute, and have the edges crenate, or more or less distinctly serrate with sharp incurved teeth.

The veins are free, and are pinnately forked into from three to five slender oblique veinlets, of which the lowest one on the upper side is the longest, and bears a fruit-dot near its base. The fruit-dots are seldom or never found on the two or three lowest pinnÆ, but on the rest they are arranged in a row each side the midveins of the segments, and much nearer the midveins than the margins. There are in all from ten to twenty to a segment.

The indusia are larger than in most of the related species, flat, perfectly smooth, orbicular with a very narrow sinus, and slightly erose-crenulate on the margin. In the second edition of Gray’s Manual it is said that the indusium is “often orbicular without a distinct sinus, as in Polystichum;” and it is sometimes difficult to see the sinus, but I think it is rather because the sides of it overlap than because there is none. The sporangia have a ring of from fifteen to twenty articulations. The spores are ovoid, and somewhat roughened on the surface.

This fern is one of the very finest and largest of the species of the Eastern States, being surpassed in these respects only by the osmundas and the ostrich-fern. The fronds are smooth, deep-green in color, slightly paler beneath, and of a rather firm papery texture. Unlike A. Filix-mas and A. cristatum the fronds wither in the fall of the year, and are not “half-evergreen.”

It was collected by Pursh on his visit to America in the early part of this century, the precise locality not known,—in the Flora he says “New Jersey to Virginia,”—and was by him referred to A. Filix-mas. His specimens, preserved in the herbarium at Kew, are partly A. Goldianum and partly A. cristatum. Mr. John Goldie’s discovery was made near Montreal, about the year 1818, and the excellent figure in Hooker & Greville’s Icones Filicum was probably taken from one of his specimens, or perhaps from live plants originally brought by him to the Botanic Garden at Glasgow.

Though not one of our commonest Ferns, this is very abundant in certain localities:—Mrs. Roy sends it from Owen Sound, Canada; Dr. Bumstead got it in Smuggler’s Notch, Mt. Mansfield, Vermont; Mr. Frost has a fine station on Mt. Wantastiquet, New Hampshire; I find it plentiful and fine in the deep ravine called Roaring Brook, in Cheshire, Connecticut; Professor Porter has it from Burgoon’s Gap, in the Alleghany Mountains of Pennsylvania; Mrs. McCall, near Madison, Ohio; Mr. Williamson “found it in great abundance near the Little Rockcastle River, in Laurel County,” Kentucky, and Mr. Curtis has twice sent me fine specimens, with very dark scales at the base of the stalks, from the Peaks of Otter, Virginia.

The name is sometimes written Goldieanum; I give the name as it occurs in Goldie’s original paper in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal.

The specimen drawn by Mr. Faxon is from Vermont, and is represented about two-thirds of the natural size.