SCIENCE-GOSSII'. 



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green lace, and their stalks are so entirely destitute 

 of anything approaching to a woody nature, that 

 frost or drought shrivels them up. 



A little distance up the road there is a path which, 

 after crossing a couple of fields, runs through 

 a sheltered, swampy wood where the lady-fern 

 reigns. The fronds form the undergrowth beneath 

 the trees, and in one part of the wood you may see 

 at least an acre of ground under the branches 

 where there is nothing but lady-fern. Where 

 there are little open spaces you may see enormous 

 specimens with a raised trunk several inches high, 

 like an incipient tree-fern, from which spring 

 seventy or eighty forty-inch fronds whose plumy 

 tips form a circle four feet in diameter. You must 

 tread lightly here, for the ground is covered with 

 long sphagnum-moss, which holds the water like a 

 sponge. A little lower down, where the water 

 oozes into a small black bog, you may chance to 

 find the frail and slender marsh-buckler fern 

 (N. thelypicris) whose branching root-like stems 

 creep through the dark peat of the bog. 



From the other side of the road there goes off a 

 mossy path bordered by beeches, some of which are 

 little more than ruined carcases, and others have 

 been pollarded. In one there is a hole leading to 

 the hollow centre where a nuthatch has her nest. 

 In the fork of the tree above that nesting-place, the 

 thick, tough polypody [Polypodium vulgarc) fronds 

 rise from the creeping rough-coated stems — the 

 " many feet " of its name. All over these old trees 

 it grows, and creeps along the tops of the banks 

 under the hedge. Many an old beech, whose trunk 

 hafe divided off into three or four lesser trunks, 

 affords a roomy platform about ten or twelve feet 

 from the ground, upon which the falling leaves of 

 autumn accumulate. This is the bed upon which 

 the polypody spores germinate, and among the 

 mosses that spring up there the polypody nourishes 

 and covers the bark with a meshwork of its rough 

 stems. The polypody frond, you can tell at a touch, 

 is one of those beautiful things that are also made 

 to wear well. 



The path, which seems never to be trodden, leads 

 down into a deep valley where the ground is spongy 

 with leaf-mould and thick, close growths of moss. 

 Here again ferns are the prevailing vegetation — 

 lady-ferns once more, and with them multitudes of 

 the gracefully arched triangular fronds of the broad- 

 buckler fern (N. dilatation) and the prickly-toothed 

 shield fern (Aspidiuiu acuhatum), the latter species 

 growing by preference from the roots and decayed 

 stumps of trees where leaf-mould has gathered. 

 The hollow is surrounded by woods, and yet there 

 is little vegetation other than rushes, moss and 

 ferns. Up the banks all round, where the rabbit 

 burrows open, there are male ferns, and the long 

 narrow deeply-toothed fronds of the hard-fern 

 (Lomaria spicant). But if we desire to see the hard- 



fern we must ascend the hill, and there, on its 

 summit, among the heather under the shadow of 

 the tall pines and in the deep ruts of the avenues 

 dug by the wheels of timber-wains, there are great 

 beds of hard-fern acres in extent, their roots and 

 stems so matted and intergrown that it is very 

 difficult to obtain 'a specimen. Like the polypody, 

 its fronds are tough and leathery in texture, but 

 there is in this species an added stiffness which well 

 entitles it to the name of " hard-fern." There is a 

 peculiarity of this fern which gives it a special 

 charm ; those fronds which produce no spores are 

 shorter, broader, fresher in tint, and lay on the 

 earth with a peculiar flat curve, whilst the fertile 

 fronds are drawn out inordinately and stand very 

 erect, their lobes curled at the edges over the 

 precious spores, which gives this kind of frond the 

 appearance of a fish's backbone. 



Upon the brow of the hill there comes up in the 

 month of April the singular fern called moonwort 

 (Botrychittm lunaria) which throws up but one stalk, 

 ultimately dividing into two fronds, a barren and a 

 fertile. It is less than a foot in height, and by July 

 it has dwindled away and disappeared. In the old 

 days, when the doctrine of signatures had free play, 

 this plant got its name because the lobes of the 

 frond are shaped somewhat like half-moons ; hence 

 it was called lunaria, or moonwort. Having got this 

 name, it follows that it should next be said that the 

 moon owns it and that it is subject to her influences. 

 But in some unaccountable way it became credited 

 with the miraculous power to open any locks that 

 might be touched with it, and of loosing the shoes 

 of horses that might walk over the grass in which it 

 grew. And does not Nicholas Culpeper, gent., tell 

 us that story of the Earl of Essex's horses which, 

 being drawn up in a body on White Down, in 

 Devonshire, near Tiverton, had thirty shoes pulled 

 off, " many of them being but newly shod, and no 

 reason known, which caused much admiration"? 

 All round about the hill-top grows the golden- 

 fronded mountain-fern, which gives off a sweet 

 fragrance as of new hay. 



Below the hill on its southern slope is a swampy 

 wood where the ferns grow on islands of dead leaves. 

 There are enormous specimens of lady-fern and 

 broad-buckler growing with their roots right in the 

 water ; and if you know where to look for them you 

 may find examples of the royal-fern — the Osniunda 

 regalis — not of so great a stature as the plant attains 

 in some other places, because it is a fern of the 

 wet lowlands, whilst here the elevation is at least 

 six hundred feet. 



Walk westward through the wood among ferns 

 innumerable ; then into the lane where the walls 

 are ornamented with hart's-tongue whose pale fronds 

 tell of a want of moisture. The same wall produces 

 other kinds of fern — black spleen wort (Asplenium 

 adiantum-nigrum) with its dark green varnished 



