FERNS 



Hardy Ferns. Ferns are plants which, instead of blossom- 

 ing and bearing seed, only produce leaves or fronds upon 

 which, usually on the back, little heaps or lines of brownish 

 powder appear. This powder is really tiny pods or capsules, 

 and these pods or capsules are filled with a still finer powder, 

 called " spores." These spores, falling on a damp place, 

 grow into little green scales like green herring scales, and 

 after bearing little organisms on these under sides, far too 

 small to be seen without a strong magnifying glass, tiny ferns 

 grow from these in due course. As some Fern fronds are 

 quite covered with heaps of tiny pods, and each pod may 

 have fifty or sixty spores in it, a single Fern plant may pro- 

 duce millions every season. We may, therefore, usually tell 

 a Fern from a flowering plant by noting that there are no 

 flowers or buds in the .first place and then by looking on the 

 backs of the fronds, when if we find such lines or dots we 

 may be reasonably sure it is a Fern. 



Another sign of a Fern is seen in the way the leaves 

 or fronds grow. They always begin coiled up tightly into 

 a sort of knot at the top of a stalk ; that knot loosens itself, 

 and then we shall see that all the side divisions are coiled 

 up too, so that there is a constant unrolling and spreading 

 out until the whole of the frond is flat and complete. No 

 flowering plant does this ; if we look at a plant of Cow 

 Parsley, which is so very like a Fern, we find the leaves push 

 up from the centre in a sharp spiky fashion, and are straight 

 at all stages of growth. Recollecting these two points of 

 difference it will be easy at any rate to say whether a plant 

 is a Fern or a flowering one. Having got so far we shall 

 find that Ferns are of many sorts, their fronds are made in 

 very different ways, and the dots and lines of spores will 

 be found to be always the same upon the same sort of Fern. 

 It has been found that, although the shape and make of 

 the frond may be very different even in the same sort or 

 " species " that is, finer or coarser cut, or of smaller or 

 larger size no one species or family will have dots on one 



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