HORSE-TAILS AND SCOURING RUSHES. 



By Dr. W. W. Bailey. 



IT is not alone flowering- plants that render spring attractive. 

 Certain near relatives of ferns and, like them, of very an- 

 cient lineage are, as early as March, often seen rising like 

 miniature columns, from damp, sandy soil. They are espe- 

 cially fond of rail-way banks and similar locations. 



It is the fertile or fruit-bearing portion of the plants that 

 is the first to appear, and it is of a pale brownish color, devoid 

 of leaf-green or chlorophyll. By a lengthened underground 

 stem or rootstock, it is connected with the barren frond, a 

 much-branched, pine-like affair, the real foliage of the plant. 

 It is from the appearance of this verdant, showy part that the 

 name "horse-tail" is derived. Another species, much taller, 

 slenderer, from its rough, silica-covered surface, is called 

 "scouring-rush," and is employed in old-fashioned places for 

 cleansing tin-pans and other articles. This kind, which has 

 only one sort of frond, produces the fruiting part near its 

 apex. This dies off at the end of the season, at the same time 

 giving rise to branches at the nodes, which set out in life as 

 new plants on their own account ; one of the cases more or less 

 common, of bud reproduction, supplementing that by seed. 

 The true "scouring-rush" or "shave-grass" is not as handsome 

 as the horse-tail but in a way gives a better idea of its long- 

 ago progenitors. 



Far back in geological times, the forbears of the horse- 

 tails, very near akin to our modern lycopods ground-pines, 

 creeping jenny and club mosses, formed large trees, both as to 

 girth and altitude. "They were," says Dana, "lofty woody 

 trees, with scarred trunks and branches." They formed the 

 lepidodendrons and calamites of the coal-measures. The 

 scars seen on their sides are the impressions left by the fronds 

 as they die away at the season's end, as we note in modern tree- 

 ferns like certain Dicksonias. As would be surmised from their 

 fern affiliations, they helped to form the vast coal-fields that 



40 



