LOWLY VEGETABLE FORMS. 4?1 



called spores, or sporules, generally invisible to the naked eye, and 

 differing from true seeds in germinating from any part of their surface 

 instead of from two invariable points. Besides this grand distinguish- 

 ing mark, they possess several other peculiar qualities in common. 

 They consist of cells only, and hence are often called cellular plants, 

 in contradistinction to those plants which are possessed of fibres and 

 woody tissue. Their development is also superficial, growth taking 

 place from the various terminal points ; and hence they are called 

 acrogens and thallogens, to distinguish them from monocotyledonous 

 and dicotyledonous plants. Popularly, they are known as mosses, 

 lichens, algae, and fungi. They open up a vast field of physiological 

 research. They t constitute a microcosm, a strange minute world un- 

 derlying this great world of sense and sight, which, though unseen 

 and unheeded by man, is yet ever in full and active operation around 

 us. It is pleasant to turn aside for a while from the busy human 

 world, with its ceaseless anxieties, sorrows, and labors, to avert our 

 gaze from the splendors of forest and garden, from the visible display 

 of green foliage and rainbow-colored blossoms around us, and con- 

 template the silent and wonderful economy of that other world of 

 minute or invisible vegetation with which we are so mysteriously re- 

 lated, though we know it not. There is something exceedingly inter- 

 esting in tracing Nature to her ultimate and simplest forms. The 

 mind of man has a natural craving for the infinite. It delights to 

 speculate either on the vast or the minute ; and we are not surprised 

 at the paradoxical remark of Linnaeus, that Nature appeared to him 

 greatest in her least productions. 



These plants once occupied the foremost position in the economy 

 of Nature. Like many decayed families whose founders were kings 

 and mighty heroes, but whose descendants are beggars, they were 

 once the aristocracy of the vegetable kingdom, though now reduced 

 to the lowest ranks, and considered the canaille of vegetation. Geolo- 

 gy reveals to us the extraordinary fact that one whole volume of the 

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

 Life may have been ushered upon our globe through oceans of the 

 lowest types of Confervaz, long previous to the deposit of the oldest 

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

 tremely simple and minute plants may have represented the only idea 

 of life on earth. But, passing from conjecture to the domain of estab- 

 lished truth, we know of a certainty that, at least throughout the vast 

 periods of the Carboniferous era, ferns, mosses, and still humbler plants, 

 occupied the throne of the vegetable kingdom, and, by their countless 

 numbers, their huge dimensions, and rank luxuriance, covered the 

 whole earth with a closely-woven mantle of dark-green verdure from 

 Melville Island in the extreme north, to the islands of the Antarctic 

 Ocean in the extreme south. The relics of these immense primeval 

 forests, reduced to a carbonaceous or bituminous condition by the 



