140 ' BOARD OF AQRICULTURE. 



flowers. These are denominated cryptogamic or flowerless plants. 

 They are such plants as sea-weeds, ferns, mosses and mushrooms. 

 They are generally of unattractive aspect, but some possess 

 surpassing' beauty of form and richness of color. In the geological 

 ages preceding man, the scanty soil was clothed with species of 

 cryptogamic plants. Many impressions of these are found near 

 coal mines where the slates have locked up their treasures for the 

 later times ; nay more, the very coal we burn is largely made up 

 of fossil flowerless plants of the coal-forming period. In historic 

 time the succession of vegetation has been found to be as follows : 

 Upon the sterile rock the lichen makes its hold secure, and living 

 principally upon the air, it gradually disintegrates the solid 

 granite to which it clings, and thus a soil is made in which the 

 humbler plants can live. The flowerless precede the flowering 

 plants, acting as their pioneers. But when the flowering plants 

 are thrifty, the flowerless disappear ; where the flowering plants, 

 from local causes, become diseased or unhealthy, the flowerless 

 dispute their place and even attack the enfeebled vegetation. It 

 is in thick swamps, and on poor soil, and at high altitudes that you 

 find the flowerless plants predominating over flowering plants. 

 This struggle for supremacy is an unequal one. Witli the assis- 

 tance of man to modify the character of wet soil by underdraining, 

 and to change the constituents of a wretched soil by the applica- 

 tion of fertilizers, the flowerless plants may be made to almost 

 wholly disappear from a given locality. 



It would not be worth our while to notice the flowerless plants 

 at this time, if it were not for the fact that some of them live not 

 upon poor soil, nor upon dead plants, but upon enfeebled vegeta- 

 tion to aggravate its disease. These cryptogamic plants we call 

 flowerless parasites. They belong to the great mushroom family. 

 They are distinguished from Algte, to which sea-weeds are 

 assigned, by their never growing in water, and from the Lichens 

 by their more fugitive nature. Kepresentatives of this family of 

 plants are found of all sizes, from the minutest cells to immense 

 masses of tissue weighing many pounds. Professor Berkeley 

 describes a fungus which grew in three weeks to seven feet, five 

 inches in circumference, and which weighed thirty-four pounds. 

 These fungi are found everywhere in nature existing upon lifeless 

 or enfeebled organisms. They possess widely difl'erent properties, 

 some being deadly in their nature, while others are very whole- 

 some. Many communities in Continental Europe make much use 



