i. MOSS. 23 



cal obedience, like a crystal of wavellite ? * Strange 

 that the vegetable creatures growing so fondly on rocks 

 should form themselves in that mineral-like manner. It 

 is true that the tops of all well-grown trees are rounded, 

 on a large scale, as equally ; but that is because they grow 

 from a central stem, while these mossy mounds are made 

 out of independent filaments, each growing to exactly his 

 proper height in the sphere short ones outside, long in 

 the middle. Stop, though ; is that so ? I am not even 

 sure of that ; perhaps they are built over a little dome of 

 decayed moss below, f I must find out how every fila- 



* The reader should buy a small specimen of this mineral ; it is a 

 useful type of many structures. 



f LUCCA, Aug. 9/i, 1874. I have left this passage as originally writ- 

 ten, but I believe the dome is of accumulated earth. Bringing home, 

 here, evening after evening, heaps of all kinds of mosses from the hills 

 among which the Archbishop Iluggieri was hunting the wolf and her 

 whelps in Ugolino's dream, I am more and more struck, every day, with 

 their special function as earth-gatherers, and with the enormous im- 

 portance to their own brightness, and to our service, of that dark and 

 degraded state of the inferior leaves. And it fastens itself in my mind 

 mainly as their distinctive character, that as the leaves of a tree become 

 wood, so the leaves of a moss become earth, while yet a normal part of 

 the plant. Here is a cake in my hand weighing half a pound, bright 

 green on the surface, with minute crisp leaves ; but an inch thick be- 

 neath ii what looks at first like clay, but is indeed knitted fibre of 

 exhausted moss. Also, I don't at all find the generalization I made from 

 the botanical books likely to have occurred to me from the real things. 

 No moss leaves that I can find here give me the idea of resemblance to 

 pineapple leaves; nor do I see any. through my weak lens, clearly ser- 



