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the colouring they exhibit, before due attention will be given to their study scien- 
tifically. Artists are of necessity students of local colouring, yet how few under- 
stand on what that local colouring depends, or are able to name the causes 
of it! A skilful landscape painter was once praising to me the banks of a 
retired brook, which for a long distance, he said, was beautifully verdant by an 
extensive growth of a kind of moss that he had not seen elsewhere. I asked him 
to show me a specimen, and it then appeared that his supposed moss was really 
a marchantia, which, by its close thalloid growth, often cases the banks of seques- 
tered brooks in a peculiar manner. My friend, after this enlightenment, was 
induced to look more minutely into vegetation than he had hitherto done, and on - 
visiting him the other day I found he had brought home from the New Forest, 
where he had been sketching, a whole bag-full of lichens from the old trees, there 
to study them at his leisure. 
But people in general who are not practical students of Natural History 
look to the colourable aspect of things, and are attracted by landscape scenery 
accordingly. My own efforts have always been directed to describe the objects of 
Nature in popular language, and thus give an incitement to instructive observa- 
tion. If this isan humble position to take, still I think it awakens attention— 
tends to enlarge the number of students of Nature, who are often deterred by the 
technicalities of science, and the continually changing nomenclature of difficult 
pronunciation that of late years has been especially introduced in the departments 
of Botany and Palzontology. 
But to come at once to the purport of my paper, I would remark that it is 
by no means generally acknowledged that the lower tribes of vegetation often 
impart a peculiar character and colouring to the landscape, and non-scientific 
observers do not understand the nature of what they perceive, though fully 
obvious to the eye. Poets and painters, who ought to be close observers as to what 
gives colouring to objects, yet seldom do more than take a superficial look. Thus 
Crabb mentions :— 
The wiry moss that whitens all the hill, 
not apparently aware that this gray moss is in reality the the Reindeer Lichen, 
that on waste heaths and the dreary mountains of the north gives such a peculiar 
feature to the treelesslandscape. So Southey, noticing an old decrepid apple tree, 
hoary in its aspect as a gray-haired man, calls the Usnea, that depends its lichenic 
filaments there, a moss, though it is well-known to the Naturalist that while the 
majority of lichens are gray, hoary, or gloomy-looking, the extensive tribe of 
mosses are mostly green. 
The mosses, however, in all their verdant beauty do cover eminences to a 
great extent, as may be noticed on the Malvern Hills, where, except grasses and 
gorse, but few other plants are to be found. So old roofs and thatched barns and 
cottages assume the liveliest green tints as winter approaches. Hence an observant 
poet is correct when he says— 
When on the barn’s thatch’d roof is seen, 
Mosses in tufts of liveliest green, 
When flowers are dead and all is drear, 
Re sure that Christmas-tide is near. 
