1 66 Country Rambles. 



named by Linnaeus in reference to the use which he says 

 it was put to by the peasantry in Sweden. Possessed of 

 properties so much the more singular from their occur- 

 rence in a water-plant, the country people, he tells us, 

 were accustomed to use it to fill up the spaces between 

 the chimneys and the walls of their houses, so as to 

 exclude the air and serve as a protection against fire. 

 The wood is in many parts quite a little natural fernery. 

 We have on various occasions seen no fewer than five 

 different species all growing so near together that they 

 could be touched without moving a single step the 

 common shield-fern, the broad-leaved sylvan shield-fern, 

 the hard-fern, the oak-fern, and the beech-fern. Oak- 

 fern, Polypodium Dryopteris, is a frequent inhabitant of 

 the dells hereabouts where moist, growing in patches 

 more than a foot across. 



Like the rocks of Whaley Bridge, Kinder Scout, 

 Greenfield, and Seal Bark, those of the Hebden valley 

 consist of millstone-grit, alternating with shale, the latter 

 cropping out chiefly along the course of the river. It 

 was among these shales, though perhaps more particu- 

 larly in portions laid bare during the construction of the 

 line along the main or Todmorden valley, that Samuel 

 Gibson, the once celebrated blacksmith-naturalist of 

 Hebden Bridge, pursued his researches in connection 

 with fossil shells, as described in the first volume of the 

 Transactions of the Manchester Geological Society (1841). 

 His work is said, in the volume in question, to have been 

 carried on in "High Green Wood," and as regards the 



