Life-cycles in leptosporangiate homosporous ferns which normally occur in nature have been reported to be either obligately sexual, with a haploid-diploid alternation of generations, or obligately apogamous. Apogamous reproduction is a process which requires two basic phenomena: production of viable spores either by meiosis (Dopp, 1932; Manton, 1950; Mehra & Singh, 1957) or by mitosis (Evans, 1964) and production of a diploid or haploid sporophyte from a diploid or haploid gametophyte without an intervening act of syngamy. In many sexual species apogamous outgrowths from the gametophyte can be induced by abnormally prolonged cultural conditions. This type of reproduction in sexual species has not been observed in nature, and sporophytes produced in this manner in cultivation have not produced viable spores (Manton, 1950, p. 201). Further elaborations of the fern life-cycle include vegetative reproduction, which is found in a large number of species, and apospory, which has been produced in the laboratory but has yet to be shown conclusively to occur in nature (see DeBenedictis, 1969, for a review of literature on apogamy and apospory in ferns). In addition to the obligate nature of the sexual or apogamous life-cycle, some species of homosporous ferns can be characterized as being high polyploids, a condition apparently evolved in response to the primarily homothallic nature of their gametophytic reproductive biology (Klekowski & Baker, 1966). As a result of this general dominant polyploid theme, base numbers of extant genera are themselves composed of several sets of duplicate chromosomes, with multivalent formation during meiosis restricted or eliminated by genetic or physiological control of bivalent pairing. Evidence is accumulating that the polyploid condition in ferns has selective advantage in that it provides storage of genetic information which is later released by homoeologous recombination (Klekowski, 1973). It is the object of this paper to provide evidence from the life-cycle of a single plant of Matteuccia orientalis (Hooker) Trev. which circumstantially indicates the presence of facultative apomixis (the production of sporophytes from gametophytes by both sexual and apogamous pathways) and the production of both haploid spores and diploid spores with their subsequent germination and growth into gametophytes of two ploidy levels. Matteuccia orientalis is an Asian species distributed from India throughout China to Siberia, Korea, and Japan. It consists of two cytotypes, a diploid (n = 40) found mostly on the Asian mainland and a tetraploid (n = 80) found in Japan. Lloyd (1971) shows that the tetraploid cytotype is of autoploid origin.