THE PAGE OF NATURE. 55 



hills, sending up at short intervals from the bare, whitish, 

 procumbent stems, palm-shaped tufts of very hard foliage, 

 very like that of the savine. In other parts of the 

 world, however, they grow on the low grounds in the 

 woods and other warm, humid situations, adding to 

 the picturesqueness and beauty of the sylvan scenery. 

 One species, the Tmesipteris, remarkable for its pendu- 

 lous habit and very broad leaves, hangs down in long 

 trailing wreaths from the trunks of tree-ferns, in South 

 America and New Zealand. In the little island of St. 

 Paul, isolated from the rest of the world in the Indian 

 Ocean, thousands of miles from any friendly shore, there 

 occurs a beautiful species (L. cernitm), the presence of 

 which in that remote locality is a puzzle to the student 

 of geographical botany. This island is situated in the 

 temperate zone, while the normal range of this plant is 

 exclusively within the tropics. As, however, the island 

 is volcanic, and contains numerous hot springs, which 

 diffuse / considerable warmth around, this circumstance 

 may account for the presence of the lycopod, especially 

 as it also occurs, far out of its proper range, about the 

 warm springs of the Azores. Luxuriating in beautiful 

 tufts amid the barren tufa of this lonely island, it is a 

 welcome and refreshing sight to the voyager on the way 

 to Australia, tired of the monotony of the sea, and yearn- 

 ing for mother earth. Like himself, a stranger in a 

 strange land, it often reminds the emigrant of the brown 

 moorlands of his native country, where he used to gather 

 the trailing wreaths of the fox-fetters to bind around his 

 cap in the sunny days of youth. One very extraordinary 

 species (Selaginella convoluta}, which grows in the arid 



