THE OTTAWA NATURALIST 



VOL. XXIV. OTTAWA, JANUARY, 1911 No. 10 



CLUB MOSSES. 



By F. J. A. Morris, Port Hope, Ont. 



Few who worship Nature in her primeval shrine of the 

 ancient wood can fail to have noticed some of these pretty ever- 

 greens on the forest floor. One kind with conspicuous fruiting 

 spike woodmen and others know as Club Moss par excellence, 

 but apparently the plants have always been favorites of the 

 more simple peasantry, and in England their household names 

 are legion. Many of these folk-names are of the quaintest 

 Foxtail, Staghorn, Buck-grass, Creeping Bur, Forks and Knives, 

 Foxes' Claws, Lamb's-tail, Running Moss, Robin Hood's Hat- 

 band, Tod's Tail, Traveller's Joy, Wolf's-claws; of these a few 

 have migrated with early settlers, and occasionally in Canada 

 you hear the names "Staghorn" and "Wolf's Foot" applied, 

 but more generally the common species are distinguished as 

 "Hemlock Club Moss", "Ground Pine", "Running Pine", and 

 "Ground Cedar" or "TraiHng Christmas Green". 



Even the unhappy town-dweller gets glimpses from time to 

 time of the fairer scenes of boyhood or the home of his rustic 

 ancestry; for cartloads of Lycopodium are drawn to the city 

 markets in December for Yule-tide decorations. The spores, 

 too, of some species are gathered for commercial purposes, being 

 dusted over pills to prevent them from sticking together; as|a 

 fixative for dyes; and for flashlights in photography, in pyro- 

 technics and on the stage, the spores containing more than half 

 their bulk in a highly inflammable oil. On the mountain-sides- 

 of Cumberland in the English Lake District, I have sometimes 

 shaken the fruiting spikes of L. clavaium over a lighted match 

 and seen how instantaneous the combustion was. 



These points of curious interest fade into nothingness com- 

 pared with the importance of the plant to a student of evolution. 

 The systematic botanist may be content with placing the Club 

 Mosses among ferns and fern allies as sporophytes, but they 

 throw a highly illuminative side-light on the doctrine of descent. 



