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 

 brauchlets 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 

 curious 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 



