THE FLOWERLESS PLANTS. 179 



lively claret or crimson, while the termination is green or 

 brown. I have nothing to say of the physiology of their 

 propagation. I treat of mosses only as they are beautiful 

 objects of sight, and useful agents in unfolding and dis- 

 tributing the bounties of Nature. This tribe furnishes no 

 sustenance to man or to any other animal. Those eatable 

 plants which are called by the name of mosses are either 

 lichens or sea-weeds. Nature, who, with a provident hand, 

 renders many of her productions capable of supplying a 

 manifold purpose in her economy, has limited the agency 

 of the mosses to a few simple and beautiful services. 

 They perform, under her invisible guidance, for the field 

 and the forest, what is done by the painter and the 

 embosser for the works of the builder of temples and 

 palaces. 



The ferns have fewer picturesque attractions than the 

 mosses ; but like the latter, they are allied with the prim- 

 itive wilds of nature, with gloomy swamps, which they 

 clothe with verdure, and with rocky precipices, on whose 

 shelvy sides they are distributed like the tiles on the roof 

 of a house. They resemble mosses in their dissimilarity to 

 common vegetable forms ; and their broad wing-like leaves 

 or fronds are the conspicuous ornaments of wet woods and 

 solitary pastures which are unvisited by the plough. By 

 their singular appearance we are reminded of the primi- 

 tive forms of vegetation on the earth's surface, and of the 

 luxuriant productions of the tropics. 



The ferns are for the most part a coarse tribe of plants, 

 having more beauty in their forms than in their texture. 

 In temperate latitudes it is only their leaf or frond that 

 is conspicuous, their stems being either prostrate or sub- 

 terranean. Yet in some of the species nothing can be 

 more beautiful than the ramifications of their fronds. In 

 their arrangements we may observe a perfect harmony 

 and regularity, without the formality that marks the com- 



