316 Transactions.— Botany. 
innumerable fine and drooping racemes of flowers, their long and stout 
spreading branches frequently descending low down from a great height in 
graceful curves, after the manner of growth of the horse-chestnut of our 
English parks; having growing in their topmost forks and branches 
the curious tufted long-leaved epiphytical plant Astelia, somewhat re- 
sembling huge crows’-nests, and serving to remind the English observer 
of a rookery; while from their upper trunks and limbs hang, in long 
drops and festoons, the handsome and showy species of climbing Me- 
trosideros (M. pendens and M. subsimilis), with their pendent flowering 
branchlets terminating in beautiful tasselled bunches of white blossoms 
waving in the air; and still higher up, here and there, as if gazing down 
from its dark-green bowers, is the Spring Beauty of the Woods ! the large- 
flowered lofty-climbing Clematis (C. indivisa), whose big white star-like 
sweet-scented flowers (often 4 inches in diameter), and many together in 
garlands and festoons high up in the trees by the highway-side in those 
forests, are the admiration of every traveller in the spring season. And, 
lastly, (to enumerate no more), on the ground, in the few open spaces 
between the larger and the tufted-growing ferns, is to be seen that graceful 
living green-matted plant, Pratia angulata, with its profusion of peeping 
eurious snow-white flowers. 
I should not, however, omit to tell you something, though briefly, of 
the many minor beauties of those secluded spots in the deep forests ; of the 
numerous dear little gem-plants of the smaller Cryptogams,—the Mosses, 
the Liverworts, and the Lichens, which I have already in the begin- 
ning of this paper alluded to. For these, by their great number, their 
densely close compacted manner of growth, and every variety of shape 
and hue and colour, minute though they severally are, yet, united, 
form and present a most striking and interesting feature; while closely 
intermingled among them grow luxuriantly many of the smaller filmy and 
feathery ferns. The colours of many of them, especially of the Lichens, are 
both striking and vivid; generally displaying their organs of fructification, 
and fruits, in profusion, and to very great advantage; and then their 
elegant structure, so lovely and complex, and yet so simple, on closer ex- 
amination, is wondrous. To see them on the large trunk of an aged tree, 
some scores,—or hundreds, it may be,—of those minute plants of many 
hues and kinds overlying one another, growing on and in each other 
(stratum super stratum) so that they cannot be separated without pulling 
them to pieces, and yet all alike living, healthy, and in harmony, where 
they have been so growing together for many years,—perhaps, in some 
cases, a century or more,—is both curious and pleasing, and brings strongly 
to recollection (as do also the bigger ferns and other plants flourishing 
