MOSSES, 4t 
foot ; they may be torn up by the plough or the 
harrow ; they may be cropped down to the earth, 
when mixed with grass, by graminivorous ani- 
mals; they may be injured in a hundred other 
ways ; but, in a marvellously short space of time, 
they spring up as verdant in their appearance and 
as perfect in their form as though they had never 
been disturbed. The necessity of such a power of 
regeneration as this is abundantly manifest, when 
we consider the numberless casualties to which 
they are exposed in the bare shelterless positions 
which they occupy. 
Mosses also possess the power of resisting, per- 
haps to a greater extent than most plants, the 
injurious operation of physical agents; and this 
likewise is a wise provision to qualify them for the 
uses which they serve in the economy of nature. 
The influence of heat and cold upon many of them 
is extremely limited ; some species flourishing in- 
discriminately on the mountains of Greenland and 
the plains of Africa. They have been found grow- 
ing near hot springs in Cochin-China, and fringing 
the sides of the geysers of Iceland, where they 
must have vegetated in a heat equal to 186 de- 
grees ; while, on the other hand, they have been 
gathered in Melville Island at 35 degrees, or only 
just above the freezing-point. Though frozen 
hard under the snow-wreaths of winter for several 
