CHAPTER II 

 LIVERWORTS 



r I THE Liverworts, or Hepaticce, to give them 

 -*- their scientific name, form a small group of 

 plants which come next below the mosses in the 

 scale of botanical life ; they stand, as it were, 

 between the mosses on the one hand, and the 

 lichens and fungi on the other, being less highly 

 organised than the former, and somewhat more 

 highly organised than the latter. Their relation- 

 ship to the mosses is, in many respects, so 

 close, and the structure of the two tribes of plants 

 is so similar, that the student of the one may 

 well include the other in his purview ; indeed, so 

 nearly do the two approximate to each other in 

 some respects, that we meet with plants in which 

 it would seem that a comparatively slight varia- 

 tion in some detail of organisation would have 

 sufficed to transfer them to the other side of the 

 dividing line to that on which they have been 

 actually located ; whilst in some few members 

 of one or other of the two tribes there are 

 certain small points of form or construction which 

 strikingly resemble some corresponding feature 

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