72 THE PLANT WORLD 



BRIEFER ARTICLES. 



The Curly Grass, Schizaea pusilla. 



As is well-known, this fern is abundant at several stations in the 

 pine barrens of New Jersey, where it reaches its maximum develop- 

 ment in size and in number of stations. At Forked River it gi'ows on 

 the edge of a patch of woods of the southern white cedar, in an open 

 boggy meadow, which at the time we were there was a brilliant orange- 

 color with the tall spikes of the bog asphodel. Around the base of 

 hummocks of peat-moss, mixed with sedges, sundews, and lycopods, it 

 grew, and in little sandy hollows, shaded by bushes we found the young 

 plants. They could be recognized by the rolled tips of the leaves, and 

 when pulled or dug up, it could be seen with an ordinary pocket-lens 

 that between the root and the leaf there were numerous branching 

 green filaments, looking like a fresh-water alga or the protonema of a 

 moss. These filaments proved to be the prothallium, but quite unlike 

 that of ordinary ferns, in fact nothing quite so simple or so like those 

 of the mosses has been heretofore described. It comes nearest to ful- 

 filling Goebel's idea of what the ancestral parent might have been, as it 

 bears the antheiidia and archegonia directly on the filaments. The 

 antheridia are quite abundant near the extremities of the branches; the 

 archegonia are fewer, 2-12 having been found on a single plant. Thej^ 

 are large and quite conspicuous with a magnification of fifty diameters, 

 and remain attached near the point from which the filaments radiate, 

 on slightly thickened, fleshy white filaments. On the extremities of the 

 filaments were found a number of globose cells in pairs, usually inhab- 

 ited by a mycorhiza, that is, by a fungus growing in symbiotic relation 

 to the filaments, and serving as its agent in nutrition. They break up 

 the contents of the cells into granular fungoid masses, and send long 

 liyphae through the cells. The radicles were found to occur only on 

 these cells, and they are apparently formed only on those filaments 

 which turn down toward the ground, the ones which are erect being 

 always green, without radicles or fungoid cells. They must ser\e a 

 useful purpose, as the filaments remain attached long after the fertili- 

 zation of the archegonium, even when the young sporophyte has rooted 

 and produced several leaves, often nearly an inch high. Ultimately 

 they all succumb to the attacks of fungi, which discolor the cells, pene- 

 trate the walls, surround the extremities of the filaments and stop their 

 growth. The root has a cap of four spreading cells like a four-leaf 



