MOSS. 21 



over a little dome of decayed moss below.* I must find out 

 how every filament grows, separately from root to cap, 

 through the spirally set leaves. And meanwhile I don't know 

 very clearly so much as what a root is or what a leaf is. Be- 

 fore puzzling myself any farther in examination either of moss 

 or any other grander vegetable, I had better define these pri- 

 mal forms of all vegetation, as well as I can or rather begin 

 the definition of them, for future completion and correction. 

 For, as my reader must already sufficiently perceive, this book 

 is literally to be one of studies not of statements. Some one 

 said of me once, very shrewdly, When he wants to work out 

 a subject, he writes a book on it. That is a very true saying 

 in the main, I work down or up to my mark, and let the 

 reader see process and progress, not caring to conceal them. 

 But this book will be nothing but process. I don't mean to 

 assert anything positively in it from the first page to the last. 



* LUCCA, Aug. Qth, 1874. I have left this passage as originally writ- 

 ten, but I believe the dome is of accumulated earth. Bringing home, 

 here, evening after evening, heaps of all kinds of mosses from the hills 

 among which the Archbishop Ruggieri was hunting the wolf and her 

 whelps in Ugolino's dream, I am more and more struck, every day, with 

 their special function as earth-gatherers, and with the enormous im- 

 portance to their own brightness, and to our service, of that dark and 

 degraded state of the inferior leaves. And it fastens itself in my mind 

 mainly as their distinctive character, that as the leaves of a tree become 

 wood, so the leaves of a moss become earth, while yet a normal part of 

 the plant. Here is a cake in my hand weighing half a pound, bright 

 green on the surface, with minute crisp leaves ; but an inch thick be- 

 neath in what looks at first like clay, but is indeed knitted fibre of ex- 

 hausted moss. Also, I don't at all find the generalization I made from 

 the botanical books likely to have occurred to me from the real things. 

 No moss leaves that I can find here give me the idea of resemblance to 

 pineapple leaves ; nor do I see any, through my weak lens, clearly ser- 

 rated ; but I do find a general tendency to run into a silky filamentous 

 structure, and in some, especially on a small one gathered from the 

 fissures in the marble of the cathedral, white threads of considerable 

 length at the extremities of the leaves, of which threads I remember 

 no drawing or notice in the botanical books. Figure 1 represents, mag- 

 nified, a cluster of these leaves, with the germinating stalk springing 

 from their centre ; but my scrawl was tired and careless, and for once, 

 Mr. Burgess has copied too accurately. 



