SECT. xi. LYCOPOD1ACE&. 373 



SECTION XI. 



LYCOPODIACEJ3, OR CLUB MOSSES. 



THE Club Mosses are mostly perennial plants, with 

 slender creeping stems, often several feet or yards in 

 length, occasionally erect, and clothed by small, sessile, 

 closely set, often imbricated leaves without veins. They 

 have in some instances a habit resembling that of 

 Conifers. The stems consist of a mass of thick-walled, 

 often dotted cells, enclosing one or many bunches of 

 scalariform tissue, which sends off branches to every leaf 

 and bud. The scalariform tissue is accompanied by 

 fine, elongated, and sometimes rather coarser cells, which 

 are occasionally reticulated. The stem approaches to 

 that of ferns, but the bundles of vascular tissue are 

 confined to the centre. The branches of the stems are 

 often bifurcate, and terminate in one or a pair of cone- 

 like spikes, which are either sessile or stalked. The 

 sporangia are sessile in the axils of the imbricated 

 leaves or bracts that cover the cones. Two kinds grow 

 on the same plant, one of them bivalved, containing a 

 powdery substance, whose particles a high magnifying 

 power shows to be globular sperm atozoids : these do 

 not germinate ; and the other three-valved, enclosing 

 comparatively large, nearly spherical granules, marked 

 with three prominent ridges, radiating from one ex- 

 tremity. These certainly germinate, forming by cell- 

 division a prothallus of hexagonal cellular tissue, 

 adherent to and confluent with the spores, as in 

 Marsileacese, or penetrating their cavity, but without 



