156 CRYPTOGAMOUS OR FLOWERLESS PLANTS. [SECTION 17. 



Section XVII. CEYPTOGAMOUS OR FLOWERLESS 



PLANTS. 



481. Even the beginner in botany should have some general idea of 

 what cryptogamous plants are, and what are the obvious distinctions of the 

 principal families. Although the lower grades are difficult, and need special 

 books and good microscopes for their study, the higher orders, such as 

 Ferns, may be determined almost as readily as phanerogamous plants. 



482. Linnaeus gave to this lower grade of plants the name of Cryplo- 

 gamia, thereby indicating that their organs answering to stamens and 

 pistils, if they had any, were recondite and unknown. There is no valid 

 reason why this long-familiar name should uot be kept up, along with the 

 counterpart one of Phanerogamic/,. (6), although organs analogous to stamens 

 and pistil, or rather to pollen and ovule, have been discovered in all the 

 higher and most of the lower grades of this series of plants. So also 

 the English synonymous name of Flowerless Plants is both good and con- 

 venient : for they have not flowers in the proper sense. The essentials of 

 flowers are stamens and pistils, giving rise to seeds, and the essential of a 

 seed is an embryo (8). Cryptogamous or Flowerless plants are propagated 

 by Spores ; and a spore is not an embryo-plantlct, but mostly a single 

 plant-cell (399). 



483. Vascular Cryptogams, which compose the higher orders of this 

 series of plants, have stems and (usually) leaves, constructed upon the 

 general plan of ordinary plants ; that is, they have wood (wood-cells and 

 vessels, 408) in the stem and leaves, in the latter as a frame work of veins. 

 But the lower grades, having only the more elementary cellular structure, 

 are called Cellular Cryptogams. Far the larger number of the former are 

 Ferns : wherefore that class has been called 



484. Pteridophyta, Pteridophytes in English form, meaning Fern- 

 plants, that is, Ferns and their relatives. They are mainly Horsetails, 

 Ferns, Club-Mosses, and various aquatics which have been called Hydrop- 

 terides, i. e. Water-Ferus. 



485. Horsetails, Fquisetacece, is the name of a family which consists 

 only (among now-living plants) of Equisetum, the botanical name of Horse- 

 tail and Scouring Rush. They have hollow stems, with partitions at the 

 nodes ; the leaves consist only of a whorl of scales at each node, these 

 coalescent into a sheath : from the axils of these leaf-scales, in many species, 

 branches grow out, which are similar to the stem but on a much smaller 

 scale, close-jointed, and with the tips of the leaves more apparent. At the 

 apex of the stem appears the fructification, as it is called for lack of a better 

 term, in the form of a short spike or head. This consists of a good num- 

 ber of stalked shields, bearing on their inner or under face several wedge- 

 shaped spore-cases. The spore-cases when they ripen open down the inner 



