Language: Bilingual in English and Chinese
Icones Filicum Sinicarum (Fascicle 1-5) by Professor Ren-Chang Ching is well known as one of the early authoritative taxonomic works on Chinese ferns. Its publication spanned 28 years from the first Fascicle published in 1930, Fascicle II in 1934, Fascicle III in 1935, Fascicle IV in 1937, to Fascicle V in 1958. The Icones Filicum Sinicarum included a total of 251 beautiful plates illustrating 252 taxonomically important Chinese fern species known at that time. The plates depicted the fern species based on their natural sizes with magnified figures showing the taxonomically important characters. Bilingual descriptions of the taxonomy, morphology and distributions of each species, as well as information on synonymy, important publication sources and reference specimens, were provided, with the English text more comprehensively written than the concise Chinese explanation.