RECENT WORK ON MOSSES AND FERNS. 



THE Archegoniatae (Mosses and Ferns) hold with re- 

 gard to the progress of botany a position which 

 might not inaptly be compared with that of the Low 

 Countries in European history. The latter have been the 

 fighting ground of nations : being in themselves objects of 

 desire from their fertility, they commanded even a higher 

 value as controlling the great waterways which lead into 

 the very heart of Europe. And so the Archegoniatae have 

 been, and still are, the subject of much controversy ; how- 

 ever interesting they may be in themselves, as organisms 

 of beauty and of varied life-history, they appeal to the 

 wider sense of the botanist as links of connection be- 

 tween the lower green Algae, and the higher flowering 

 plants. There is even a further attraction in them, from 

 the fact that plants of this affinity are among the earliest of 

 which we have any trustworthy knowledge derived from 

 the palaeontological study of the earth's crust, a branch of 

 botanical science in which advances are rapidly being made. 

 For these reasons, there is perhaps no part of the field of 

 botany which commands more general attention than that 

 which deals with the Mosses and Ferns. It happens that our 

 eyes have been turned afresh to them by the recent publica- 

 tion of a work which, while it adds materially to the store 

 of known facts, also brings forward fresh and weighty 

 points for discussion (A fosses and Ferns, by D. H. Camp- 

 bell : Macmillan & Co., 1895). 



The first author who attributed to the Archegoniatae 

 their true position as connecting links, and showed on a 

 broad footing of observation how their parts may be com- 

 pared respectively with those of plants higher and lower in 

 the scale, was Hofmeister ; and it is not likely that any 

 future writer will ever find it possible to compress into a 

 single volume results which will have so wide and so per- 

 manent an influence as his upon this department of botanical 

 thought. By him the comparative method was virtually 



