MOSSES AND FUNGI. 177 
plant which appears as the result of fertilization. These club-mosses 
and T'mesipteris seem rather out of place on the earth at the present 
time, for their nearest relatives are plants of the long-ago which were 
quite common ages before the seed-plants which now beautify the 
earth came into existence. Of these relics of the dim past there are 
also in New Zealand two other genera—Phylloglossum and Psilotum— 
each with one species. The early stage of the latter was also unknown 
until last year, when Lawson discovered and described it ; the former 
earlier yielded up some of its secrets to Professor A. P. W. Thomas, 
of Auckland. 
The mosses and liverworts embrace hundreds of species living 
under all kinds of conditions, and varying in size from the giant 
Dawsoma superba (fig. 32) and Polytrichum dendroides, 2 feet or more 
high, to tiny species of liverworts (Frulania, &c.), which cling to the 
bark of trees. Very interesting is the way in which both mosses 
and liverworts build up great cushions in stations where the air 
is almost constantly saturated with moisture. In the forests of 
Stewart Island, but chiefly in the south and west, the cushions 
look just like moss-covered boulders (fig. 37). 
Low down in the scale of the plant-world come those most wonderful 
of plants the fungi, whose life-histories are as marvellous as any fairy 
tale, and of which but little was known sixty years ago. At the pre- 
sent time their study is of the highest economic importance, and plant 
pathologists are employed by all progressive countries to find means 
of waging warfare on these microscopic plants and other “ blights,” 
both vegetable and animal. One example of a New Zealand fungus 
must suffice. In the montane Nothofagus forests more especially, 
the boles of the larger trees are covered in many instances with a 
thick coating of a coal-black hue, which gives the trunks the appear- 
ance of having been plastered thickly with soot, and tends to enhance 
the gloomy character of the interior of these forests. This coating 
consists of a fungus, Antennaria by name, which is especially interest- 
ing from the manner in which it gets its food-supply. Antennaria 
belongs to the group of “‘ honeydew fungi,” so named because they 
utilize as food the exudation excreted by certain insects. If a piece 
of the plant be examined carefully, there will be found embedded 
in its interior numerous reddish insects somewhat resembling tiny 
wood-lice, surrounded with white fluffy material like cotton-wool. 
These are scale insects related to the well-known Coccus Cacti, from 
12—Plants. 
