130 THE MOSS-LIKE TILLANDSIA. 



Ruskin goes out to his garden and brings in a bit of old brick, 

 "emerald green on its rugged surface," and a thick piece of 

 mossy turf. 



" First for the old brick," he says. " To think of the quantity 

 of pleasure one has had in one's life from that emerald green 

 velvet, — and yet that for the first time to-day I am verily going to 

 look at it ! Doing so, through a pocket lens of no great power, I 

 find the velvet to be composed of small star-like groups of smooth, 

 strong, oval leaves, — intensely green, and much like the young 

 leaves of any other plant, except in this; — they all have a long 

 brown spike, like a sting, at their ends. 



" Fastening on that, I take the Flora Danica, and look through 

 its plates of mosses, for their leaves only; and I find, first, that this 

 spike, or strong central rib, is characteristic; — secondly, that the 

 said leaves are apt to be not only spiked, but serrated, and otherwise 

 angry-looking at the points ; — thirdly, that they have a tendency to 

 fold together in the centre; — and at last, after an hour's work at 

 them, it strikes me suddenly that they are more like pineapple 

 leaves than anything else." Here we have Ruskin beginning to 

 trip. The resemblance of moss leaves to those of pineapple is 

 most fanciful, simply because serrated and pointed and gathered 

 into a rosette. 



"And it occurs to me, very unpleasantly, at the same time, that 

 I don't know what a pineapple is ! 



" Stopping to ascertain that, I am told that a pineapple belongs 

 to the ' Bromeliacese ' — (can't stop to find out what that means) 

 — nay, that of these plants ' the pineapple is the representative ' 

 (Loudon); 'their habit is acid, their leaves rigid, and toothed with 

 spines, their bracteas often coloured with scarlet, and their flowers 

 either white or blue ' — (what are their flowers like?) But the two 

 sentences that most interest me, are, that in the damp forests of 

 Carolina, the Tillandsia, which is an ' epiphyte ' (i.e., a plant grow- 

 ing on other plants), ' forms dense festoons among the branches of 

 the trees, vegetating among the black mould that collects upon 

 the bark of trees in hot damp countries; other species are inhabi- 

 tants of deep and gloomy forests, and others form, with their spiny 

 leaves, an impenetrable herbage in the Pampas of Brazil.' So they 

 really seem to be a kind of moss on a vast scale." How Ruskin 



