HEDGE AND DITCH 



169 



this mat has been lifted by the growing bulrushes, so that 

 it looks like a torn green veil, partly bleached by the sun. 

 This is the meteoric paper of eighteenth- century naturalists, 

 with whom a meteor had come to mean rain, wind, snow, 

 or indeed any weather-phenomenon. The microscope 

 tells us the real nature of meteoric paper. 1 



What are these little green stalks, |- in. high, each sur- 

 mounted by a yellow head, which 

 stand up from one of the mud- 

 flats ? Dig up a good-sized patch, 

 take it home, and keep it moist 

 for a few weeks, to see what it 

 will grow to. Every yellow head 

 is a seed of the toad-rush (Juncus 

 bufonius), and the green stalk on 

 which it is mounted is the coty- 

 ledon ; just where the radicle 

 and the cotyledon meet a circle 

 of fine rootlets is given off. On 

 the same flat can be seen many 

 plants of Limosel, a little creeping 

 herb, with slender shoots, and 

 here and there a tuft of narrow 

 green leaves an inch or two long. 

 The pinkish corolla is so small, 

 that we cannot study it without 

 a lens. We must observe these 

 things now, for the first thunder- 

 rain will fill our ditch, and it 

 may be long before we see any- 

 thing more of either the germinating toad-rush or the 

 limosel. Many of the pond-snails lie out of the water, and 

 they are probably ill at ease, for none of them are feeding. 



1 Meteoric paper consists of the matted filaments of green algae 

 (CEdogonium or Cladophora), entangling multitudes of diatoms. It was 

 first investigated by Ehrenberg and Cohn, but had been remarked long 

 before their day, for instance, in 1736, when it covered acres of low-lying 

 ground near Breslau. 



FIG. 37. Seedlings of Toad- 

 rush, magnified. After Mirbel. 



