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ON A NEW SPEQIES OF HYPODEREIS.
By Charles Prentice, Esq.
While examining a portion of the fern herbarinra at the British
Museum a few days since, I met with what seems undoubtedly a
second unnamed species of the rare genus Hypoderris, R. Br. It was
recently (1867) brought from Nicaragua by Dr. Seemann, and pro-
posing to name it after the discoverer, I send a description and diag-
nosis.
Hypoderris Seemanni, mihi. Ehizome short, woody, sending out
several rather stout, filiform radicles ; stipes from six inches to a foot
high, brown, with a few jagged, dark brown, narrow scales at the base,
otherwise quite smooth, with the exception of a scattered scale here
and there ; frond lanceolate, pinnatifid almost to the rachis, along
which it is decuiTent, entire or slightly pinnatifid at the summit
smooth ; sori principally arranged in an intramarginal series, a few
only being scattered over the under surface of the frond ; fertile
divisions of the frond narrower than the barren ones.—Chontales
Mountains, Republic of Nicaragua (Seemann ! n. 206.)
As in H. Brownii, the frond is finely cellular under a lens, and the
peculiar venation is the same in both species ; but the smooth stipes,
the lanceolate, deeply pinnatifid frond, and the arrangement of the
sori, which are scattered equally over the whole under surface of the
frond of H. Brownii, constitute a sufficient specific distinction.
TRANSPORTATION OF SEEDS.
A correspondent from the Philippine Islands writes to us:—
received a box that had been disi)atched from Berlin in February,
1859, by overland mail, via Trieste, but got lost during the Italian
war, and only reached me after sixteen months. It was a large box
lined with tin, carefully soldered ; among its contents were two small
glass-stoppered bottles, the one filled with moist charcoal-powder, the
other with moist clay ; each contained some bulbs of red hybrid Nym-
phaceee, from the Royal Botanical Garden in Berlin. Those packed
in charcoal were spoilt, but two of the four in moist earth had germs
I;