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Hepatics

If the plants are green, growing flat and ribbon-like or as prostrate stems with paired, veinless leaves and with fruits umbrella-like or cups which do not open by lids but split irregularly into symmetrical valves in order to permit their spores to escape, one may know them to be hepatics.

The beauty which mosses lend to the surfaces upon which they live is pretty generally conceded. One has but to recall the frequent reference which our poets make to them to feel that they have always appealed to the poetic eye.

"On our other side is the straight-up rock;

And a path is kept 'twixt the gorge and it,

By boulder-stones where lichens mock

The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit

Their teeth to the polished block.

. . . . . .

These early November hours,

That crimson the creeper's leaf across

Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt,

O'er a shield else gold from rim to base,

And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped

Elf-needled mat of moss."

Browning--By the Fireside.

Ruskin says: "To them, slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark, eternal tapestries of the hills."

Whittier in "The Bridal of Pennacook," to the query of "Why turns the bride's fond eye on him, in whose cold look is naught beside the triumph of a sullen pride?" replies:

"Ask why the graceful grape entwines

The rough oak with her arm of vines;

And why the gray rock's rugged cheek

The soft lips of the mosses seek:

Why with wise instinct, Nature seems

To harmonise her wide extremes,

Linking the stronger with the weak,

The haughty with the soft and meek!"

Shakespeare calls the mosses "idle":

"It is dross, usurping ivy, brier,

or idle moss."

Comedy of Errors, Act II, Sc. 2.

Scientists of to-day tell us that the rock-loving mosses and lichens are at work upon the "everlasting hills" to convert them into new soil; that the saprophytic mosses on dead logs in the forest are at work returning to Mother Earth the materials which her tree-children took from her many years ago. They tell us that bog-mosses are reclaiming the marshes for higher plants, and that the water-loving mosses are receiving from the brooks lime-solutions which were brought up from depths below, and are laying them down in places where they are useful to man. As our knowledge of their practical value increases we shall not lose sight of their beauty, a new wonder will be added to our knowledge and many new interests to our trips "among the nodding ferns and mosses cool."

Their association with aged castles and trees is so familiar to everyone that the poet has but to mention mosses and lichens to picture lonely places and peaceful decay. "Moss-muffled forests dim" and "the rocks where the brown lichen whitens" give to us a feeling of loneliness, while the picture of Oliver--

"A wretched, ragged man o'ergrown with hair"

is complete when Orlando finds him sleeping on his back

"under an oak, whose boughs are mossed with age."

As You Like It. Act. IV, Sc. 3.

Wordsworth tells us:

"There is a thorn--it looks so old,

In truth, you'll find it hard to say

How it could ever have been young,

. . . . .

It stands erect and like a stone

With lichens it is overgrown."

Spenser expresses another idea when he says of the ancient oak:

"But now the gray moss marred his rine;"

and Shakespeare also when he introduces Tamora, Queen of the Goths, to

"A barren, detested vale . . .

The trees, though summer, yet forlorn

O'ercome with moss, and baleful mistletoe."

Titus Andronicus, Act II, Sc. 3.

Mosses and Lichens are both soil-makers. They work by two methods. The one chemical, the other mechanical. By chemical action they either construct plant tissue of gases taken directly from the air or they first free from rock or wood or earth-mould, the minerals needed and then construct them into plant tissue. By mechanical action they pry off bits of soil from hard rock, arrest dust and debris brought to them by the wind, and constantly add to the mass, such plant tissue as they themselves are continually shedding.

"Upon this herbless rock a small gray lichen

Did fix her home. She came with meek intent,

To bless her stern and sterile place of rest;

And presently her gentle sisters followed,

Some vestal white, and some in robes of brown,

And some in yellow vestures, labouring all

At the same work, with tiny cups held out

To catch the raindrops, and with mattocks small

To pierce the rock. And well did they effect