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Asexual Reproduction

The ultimate aim of the plant in developing all these complex parts is to produce tiny dust-like spores which are found in a ripened spore-case, to insure their safe keeping until all conditions are favourable for their dispersal, and then to disperse them in the most effectual way. Why it has been favourable for the perpetuation of the mosses to evolve these complicated methods, is a marvel and past the mind of man to reveal, for the plants have other and simpler methods of reproducing their kind which are, as far as man can see, just as effectual as the complicated method.

Almost any part of the moss plant is able to develop protonema cells from which new plants may grow.

Every one of the hair-like roots (rhizoids) from any part of the plant has the power of developing protonema.

The protonema of Phascum and Ephemerum lives on from year to year, reproducing new plants which live but one year.

In the species Barbula, little cellular bodies covered with a dark membrane and with their cells filled with food material appear in abundance on the protonema. Each one of these is capable of growing directly into a moss-plant or of producing protonema upon which moss-plants may grow.

Portions of a growing sporogonium, or of leaves, or of stems, may produce protonema.

Special buds or gemmae are also formed on many species. Georgia pellucida produces cellular bodies with stalks in clusters at the extremities of special stems, the clusters surrounded with a rosette of leaves. That all gemmae are modified leaves is an accepted theory.