THE PAGE OF NATURE. 33 



Almost all the mosses, which cover extensive areas of 

 mountain and lawn, and occupy large tracts of bogs and 

 watery wastes, are barren; it being a rare thing to find 

 on them capsules or any of the other compensating 

 organs. They are exceedingly proliferous, throwing out 

 young shoots from their sides or summits, and thus often 

 increasing many feet in depth, forming layer above layer, 

 the uppermost stratum alone being vital ; the rest de- 

 composed into peat, forming a rich organic soil for its 

 nourishment. 



Mosses possess in a high degree the power of repro- 

 ducing such parts of their tissue as have been injured or 

 removed. They may be trodden under foot; they may 

 be torn up by the plough or the harrow; they may be 

 cropt down to the earth, when mixed with grass, by. 

 graminivorous animals ; they may be injured in a hun- 

 dred other ways ; but, in a marvellously short space of 

 time, they spring up as verdant in their appearance and 

 as perfect in their form as though they had never been 

 disturbed. The necessity of such a power of regenera- 

 tion as this is abundantly manifest, when we consider 

 the numberless casualties to which they are exposed in 

 the bare shelterless positions which they occupy. 



Mosses also possess the power of resisting, perhaps to 

 a greater extent than all other plants of similar structure, 

 the injurious operation of physical agents ; and this like- 

 wise is a wise provision to qualify them for the uses 

 which they serve in the economy of nature. The in- 

 fluence of heat and cold upon them is extremely limited, 

 for the same species flourish indiscriminately on the 

 mountains of Greenland and the plains of Africa. They 

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