
A Meeting of the Fern Society - Petiver
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/01/13/a-meeting-of-the-fern-society/
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ohyoutravel
Reminds me of the chapter on lichens from Bill Bryson's A Short History of
Nearly Everything. A short excerpt:

You might not think there would be that many people in the world prepared to
devote lifetimes to the study of something so inescapably low key, but in fact
moss people number in the hundreds and they feel very strongly about their
subject. “Oh, yes,” Ellis told me, “the meetings can get very lively at
times.”

I asked him for an example of controversy.

“Well, here’s one inflicted on us by one of your countrymen,” he said, smiling
lightly, and opened a hefty reference work containing illustrations of mosses
whose most notable characteristic to the uninstructed eye was their uncanny
similarity one to another. “That,” he said, tapping a moss, “used to be one
genus, Drepanocladus. Now it’s been reorganized into three: Drepanocladus,
Wamstorfia, and Hamatacoulis.”

“And did that lead to blows?” I asked perhaps a touch hopefully.

“Well, it made sense. It made perfect sense. But it meant a lot of reordering
of collections and it put all the books out of date for a time, so there was a
bit of, you know, grumbling.”

~~~
pluteoid
Is this excerpt about mosses really in the chapter on lichens?

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lisper
The article seems to end with this passage:

> “Here, try this,” Moran said, appearing by my side with a hand lens so that
> I might look a little closer.

There's nothing after that, and no indication that there's another page, but
it seems like an awfully abrupt ending. Is that really it?

~~~
jraedisch
I asked myself the same. Maybe it is a way to say: if you found the topic
interesting, you should start studying it by yourself now!

You can also kind of imagine how they get into the minutiae of the particular
fern now, and how they are different from others.

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marcoperaza
I couldn't help but be reminded of The Royal Society for Putting Things On Top
of Other Things:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f-kfRREA8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f-kfRREA8M)

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jraedisch
I immediately asked myself what would happen to the Society if lots of HN
users appeared at the next meeting.

