FLOWERLESS PLANTS. 63 



plation of these grand and awful things that, perhaps 

 more powerfully than at any other time, we hear, as 

 the little lad in the temple heard the voice, while Eli 

 slept, " Have I been so long with thee, Philip, and 

 thou hast not known me ? " These things seem more- 

 over to waken up the reverent soul more acutely than 

 indoor didactics, and therefore is it good to seek their 

 presence, not neglecting temporal and immediate 

 duties and responsibilities, but in the intervals of 

 duty going amid them and beneath them to be re* 

 freshed. Fossil ferns, of the kind referred to, are 

 supplied by every coal-pit, not from that portion 

 of the coal which is best adapted for fuel, but from 

 the shaly portions which lie externally to it. 



Returning to the seeming seeds of ferns, which, as 

 we have said, are yet not their seeds, we have next to 

 ask, what then are they ? If we sprinkle them upon 

 a piece of tile, and keep the surface moistened, in due 

 time the seed-like atom begins to grow, and a minute 

 green plate is developed. Underneath and upon the 

 edges of this are produced organs that execute the 

 functions of stamens and pistil ; an actual germ is 

 ripened almost in the substance of the little plate, and 

 from this arises the new fern. The sorus on the orig- 

 inal fern-leaf is thus a branch in miniature ; every 

 theca in its turn is a cluster or bunch of flower-buds 

 in miniature, the theca itself bearing some analogy to 

 the white sheath that encloses the flower-buds of a 



