The Scottish Naturalist. 201 



houses and pavements of Greenock. Our friends at a distance, I 

 daresay, have heard that we have the reputation for now and then 

 having a few showers of rain just enough to keep our waterworks, 

 and sugar mills going ; and these occasional showers leave behind 

 them evidences of their presence and power in the green mural 

 decorations which spring up so abundantly on walls and on the 

 outsides of empty houses. We can almost tell whether a house is 

 to let or not by these significant advertisements. Green means 

 forsaken ; and " the wearing: of the green," by the houses in our 

 town shows that there is no home-rule within ; that the coercion 

 law of the household fire has not been in operation for a con- 

 siderable time. Indeed so bold are these cryptogams that they 

 march up our steps in some parts of the town in spite of the 

 assiduous washings of the servant, which cannot obliterate their 

 tell-tale marks. And should the weather by any chance at any 

 time become worse, we might almost expect them to ring the bell 

 and act the postman and deliver to us cryptogams ! 



Cryptogamic plants once occupied the foremost place in the 

 economy of nature. Like many decayed families whose founders 

 were kings and mighty heroes, but whose descendants are paupers, 

 they were once the aristocracy of the vegetable kingdom, though 

 now reduced to the lowest ranks, and considered the canaille of 

 vegetation. Geology reveals to us that one whole volume of the 

 earth's story book is filled almost exclusively with their history. 

 X.ife may have been ushered upon our globe through oceans of the 

 lowest type of confervae, long previous to the deposit of the oldest 

 palaeozoic rocks as known to us ; and for myriads of ages these 

 extremely minute and simple plants may have represented the 

 only idea of life on earth. But passing from conjecture to the 

 domain of established truth, we know of a certainty that at least 

 throughout the vast periods of the carboniferous era, ferns, and 

 mosses occupied the throne of the vegetable kingdom ; and by 

 their countless numbers, their vast dimensions, and rank luxuri- 

 ance, covered the earth with a closely woven mantle of dark green 

 verdure. The relics of these immense primeval forests, reduced 

 to a carbonaceous condition, are now buried deep in the bowels of 

 the earth, and constitute the source of our domestic comfort, and 

 of nearly all our commercial greatness. And as in early geological 

 epochs they occupied so conspicuous a position, so now in 

 geographical distribution they are entitled to a prominent place. 



