HUMBLE FAMILIES IN GRAY. 1 77 



growth, covered with a kind of greenish blue meal, 

 and often beset with minute, scale-like leaves. 

 All of the stalks are hollow. 



In what looms or wheels were the cup-bearing 

 Cladonias turned .■" How did the artificers of the 

 humid air contrive to weave so skillfully the cell 

 threads into cavities of such a variety of patterns .■• 

 Here are cups and chalices from which the bees 

 and early butterflies might feed. Dishes with 

 their edges entire or ornamented with small teeth, 

 or embossed with the minute nodes of the brown 

 apothecia, and goblets with irregularly cut rims 

 from which have grown a profusion of shoots, 

 crested with fruit caps ! What is the purpose of 

 the little hollows and cavities .■" They are not the 

 receptacles of special bodies, as are the sessile 

 disk-shaped apothecia of some of the foliaceous 

 lichens, or like the capsules of the mosses. By 

 the way in which they are sometimes cut, and 

 their inclination to break up into clusters of fer- 

 tile branchlets, we may perhaps conclude they are 

 simply the precursory forms of the higher, much 

 branched, species, of which Cladonia ratigiferina, 

 or the reindeer moss, growing abundantly on rocks 

 and sterile pastures, is a representative. 



This last-named lichen and other closely allied 

 species, which we crush beneath our feet and con- 

 sider mere litter and rubbish, are really interest- 

 ing and beautiful, if we would pause to study 



