ENDOGENS AND ACROGENS 423 



vegetable world, this primeval and wondrous race of 

 Ferns, which reigned over the earth during the carbon- 

 iferous period in forests of gigantic trees measuring, may 

 be, thirty feet in girth of trunk and well outtopping the 

 highest of our time. Some hundred and sixty families, 

 of more than nine hundred species, which then flourished, 

 are known to us by the prints they have left and which 

 have been preserved till to-day in the deposits of various 

 kinds of coal. Yet palaeontology is far from knowing all 

 and the carboniferous beds have not given up all their 

 secrets. 



The Ferns of our own period are fallen far from their 

 ancient estate and, in the northern hemisphere at least, 

 are lowly denizens of secrecy and shade. But humble 

 and modest though these daughters of the woods and 

 rocks be, no plant is more gracious or ornamental in 

 garden, rockery or room. The delicacy and beauty of 

 the fronds is altogether charming in its airy freshness, 

 and one does not notice the absence of a flower. In two 

 volumes 1 have described the strange method of fecun- 

 dation and reproduction peculiar to these flowerless 

 plants, whose sexual organs are fixed behind a green 

 plate which appears first after the germination of the 

 spores and is known by the name prothallium. One 

 of these publications was very rapidly sold out and 

 quickened many amateurs to give a large and kindly 

 place in their gardens to these winsome children of the 

 woods. Cultivation is easy ; it is enough, so far as 

 concerns the majority of our native species, to provide a 

 good bed of decomposed leaf-soil and a little atmospheric 

 moisture such as is secured by a cool and shady situation. 

 Nothing is more suitable than the ground at the foot of 

 deciduous trees. 



Botrychium Lunaria* (PI. XCVII1) : Moonwort. A 

 little plant that grows among the alpine turf, each rhizome 



