56 



mSTOKY OF CO H ASSET. 



came timidly to our rocks after the old glacier had re- 

 treated. 



Another tind of lowly vegetation, so hardy as to be 

 satisfied by a beggar's dole of nourishment, was gaining 

 a settlement here at the same time with the alga. It 

 was the tribe of lichens ! The air could carry the spores 



Photo, Octavius Reamy. 



Bladder Rockweed upon Windmill Point. 

 Showing the Glades House through gap where a dike has been washed out. 



of lichens from places farther south where the glacier had 

 not invaded or was sooner melted off, and even a rock 

 was good enough for lichens to grow upon. Not a 

 ledge in town and hardly a stone in our fields but bears a 

 lichen whose ancestry might lead back through perhaps 

 seven thousand years of Cohasset history. 



Some of it is in the degenerate form of hard, gray, 

 pebbly skin upon the rock, scarcely distinguishable in 

 many cases from the rock itself. Mere blotches upon the 



