NOYEMBEE. 523 



are now able to effect a landing on the degraded 

 rock, and as the old herbage of these die, fresh soil is 

 created, till the fern and the flower in their turn 

 appear with a load of ivy and berry-bearing trees. 



" Braving the inclemencies of every climate and 

 season," says Professor SPKENGEL, " Lichens are the 

 never-failing companions of the travelling botanist ;" 

 and so I have fonnd them, and at a time when most 

 other plants, except mosses and fungi, are in a dead 

 or denuded state, their diversified hues and crowded 

 apothecia, " make glad the solitary place." In the 

 crowded forest upon every tree, mystic characters ap- 

 pear, like old Cufic, Persian, or Chinese inscriptions, 

 from which, as Sir JAMES SMITH playfully remarks, a 

 fairy alphabet might almost be formed these are the 

 curious graphidece, so called from the resemblance of 

 their apothecia to writing. OpegrapTia scripta and 0. 

 varia are particularly remarkable in this respect, and 

 0. elegansj which is rarer, displays its large grooved 

 black characters upon the oaks of the forest, as if 

 presenting some dark enigma for a lover of the Dry- 

 ades to decypher. The young branches in plantations 

 of oaks are often so covered with the Opegraplw 

 macularis, as to seem as if purposely blackened with 

 gunpowder, or stained from an explosion of the same 

 "villainous" material. 



Another family forming the genus Calicium 7 have 

 stipitate fruit, presenting to view a crop of fairy gob- 

 lets, in some species rising from the brightest golden 

 crust, which finely adorns the stateliest oaks of the 

 grove. Verrucaria displays a great number of species 

 on rocks, or the trunks of trees, distinguished by their 

 bearing numerous black tubercles on the thallus. The 



