CHAPTER I 

 MOSSES AND LICHENS AT HOME 



V 



" Children of lowly birth, 

 Pitifully weak ; 



Humblest creatures of the wood 

 To your peaceful brotherhood 

 Sweet the promise that was given 

 Like the dew from heaven : 

 1 Blessed are the meek, 

 They shall inherit the earth* ; 

 Thus are the words fulfilled : 

 Over all the earth 

 Mosses find a home secure. 

 On the desolate mountain crest, 

 Avalanche-ploughed and tempest-tilled, 

 The sweet mosses rest ; 

 On shadowy banks of streamlets pure, 

 Kissed by the cataracts shifting spray, 

 For the bird's small foot a soft highway 

 For the many and one distressed . 



Little sermon of peace." 



Willis Boyd Allen. 



No FREQUENTER of the woods can be unfamiliar with the 

 more conspicuous lichens and mosses. It is with them that 

 nature adorns her bare unsightly children. She drapes the time- 

 worn evergreens with gray fringes (see Frontispiece) and decks 

 the old tree-stumps with red or yellow corals. Soft lichens 

 spread over the ground in the deep shade of the pine trees, while 

 pale green or yellow rosettes creep over the fence-rails and the 

 big rocks in the pasture lot. (See Colour Plate II.) 



" Far above among the mountains the silver lichen spots rest, starlike, 

 on the stone ; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder 

 western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years." Ruskin. 



Lichens and mosses are met with all over the world, in the 

 cold North and in the sunny South, in the East and in the West, 



