MOSSES AND LICHENS. 321 



We have no need for pausing times either of 

 waiting till nature is worthy of our notice in her 

 vegetable productions. The winter is a time of re- 

 pose to many of the plants ; but it is the time during 

 which others are in the greatest activity. The for- 

 ests are leafless, and the fields are bare ; most of the 

 plants that people the waters in the warm season 

 are downjn the mud at the bottom, and altogether 

 lost to the eye, and the few vegetables which remain 

 are faint in their colours and feeble in their odours. 

 But still, the winter mosses, and many of the lichens, 

 to which cold is more congenial than heat, and 

 which are brittle and crumbling during the hot season, 

 are in the prime of their vigour in winter ; and, per- 

 haps, by their agency the very first steps in the pro- 

 gress of fertility are accomplished. If there is but a 

 rock, or any thing except loose and dry sand, and moist- 

 ure, and a temperature the least shade above freez- 

 ing, there is certain to be a moss or a lichen of 

 some description or other ; and however untoward 

 the circumstances are, that lichen or moss will keep 

 growing until it forms something like a vegetable 

 mould, in which other plants will in time take root. 



Those mossy coverings which spread and thicken 

 upon the surface in cold places and cold weather 

 protect the naked parts of the earth from the severe 

 action of the cold ; and answer, in places where the 

 snow does not lie, nearly the same purpose that the 

 snow answers where it does. In some respects, 

 indeed, they answer more important purposes. 

 They are most abundant in humid places where the 

 snow does not continue, though it occasionally falls ; 

 and there they protect the earth against the alternate 

 action of the rains and the frosts. If the earth were 

 bare, the frost which is of much service to the vege- 

 tation of the coming season, by breaking down the 

 clods that have been indurated by the drought of 

 summer, would, in the course of one variable winter, 

 render the whole so soft that the rains would wash 



