170 The Ottawa Naturalist. [Jan. 



The spore-producing plants occupy a position mid-way 

 between the lowest forms of vegetation, which are purely 

 aquatic, and the highest, which are terrestrial. They are all 

 more or less amphibious, their spores requiring water to germ- 

 inate in. But with flora as with fauna there are amphibians and 

 amphibians. The Club Moss among plants, like the Duck-billed 

 Platypus among animals, is a living fossil, and the importance of 

 its bearing on the question of origins can hardly be over-esti- 

 mated. It may be said recently to have come into its own and 

 reaped the reward of its conservatism; for it has been given a 

 prominent place in that splendid floral tribute to Darwin, Prof. 

 Bower's "Origin of a Land Flora"; easily the most notable 

 contribution (in EngHsh) ever made by Botany to the Theory 

 of Evolution, and the first philosophic treatise on the subject 

 since the labours of men like Hooker and Gray were supple- 

 rhehted b)'^ their greater contemporary's "Origin of vSpecies". 



The Club Moss has been a hide-bound conservative ever 

 since the Coal Age, pursuing the even tenor of its way uninfluenced 

 by change and progress towards higher forms as evinced by the 

 more adaptive members of the vegetable kingdom, ^on after 

 aeon its policy has been the s^me; its stock argument, that what 

 was good enough for its primitive ancestors is good enough for it. 

 Clad in the same simple armour and wielding the same weapons 

 as when first it left its aquatic home and started on the war-path 

 in its daring conquest of earth, this pigmy of the forest still sub- 

 sists ; and strange sights it must have seen in its time. 



It saw the first forests ever formed, those dense jungles of 

 rank vegetation, tree-ferns and giant horse-tails quorum pars 

 magna fuit, indeed, for Club Mosses abounded then. It saw the 

 ancient whorled or radial outgrowth such as is preserved in the 

 Horse-tails, in the branching of certain Conifers, the foliation of 

 the Juniper, or the parts of a flower superseded by a more and 

 more complex system of spiral symmetry as in the phyllotaxv of 

 our modern forest trees; it saw its cousins the ferns evolve larger 

 and larger leaf- areas, and it saw the idea adopted and adapted 

 all down the line, each new type bettering the instruction till 

 they reached the umbrageous foliage of more recent vegeta' ion as 

 it dominates to-day. It watched plants pass from the prirritive 

 strobiloid form of terminal fruiting spike, such as survives in the 

 Lycopodiums and Equisetums, with their analogies in Ophio- 

 glossum or the cones of pines and spruces. It was present at 

 the inception of seed formation whereby the earliest Gvm no- 

 sperms (Cycads) first broke away from the aquatic nursery to 

 which the Lycopod still clings; and it witnessed the miracle of 

 the floral envelope replacing the wasteful vagaries of the wind 

 by the ordered efforts of myriad insect myrmidons, a marshalled 



