THE SPORES OF FERNS 



99 



nocturnal rambles on summer nights in mixed company, 

 and to have suited the mystifications and chicanery of the 

 wizards and magicians of the day. The pursuit of fern- 

 seed suggests Lord Bowen's evocation of "a blind man in 

 a dark room seeking for a black cat — which is not there," to 

 which combination he compared the study of metaphysics. 

 The most delightful piece of absurdity in the whole 

 affair is, as I have already pointed out, that ferns of all 

 kinds do produce a sort of seed — the brown or yellow 

 circular or oblong up-growths (Fig. 6) on the under surface 

 of their leaves, which are little cases filled with " spores." 

 They do not ripen till full summer or autumn, and on St. 

 John's Eve, when the fern-seed hunter went forth,' they are 

 truly enough invisible, and practically non-existent. These 

 spore capsules were well enough known to the early 

 botanists, though they escaped common knowledge. They 

 differ characteristically in number, shape and size, in such 

 common British ferns as the bracken, the male fern, the 

 polypody, and the hart's tongue. One reason probably 

 for their not being associated in popular estimation with 

 the reproduction of the fern is that the spores — minute 

 oval bodies contained in the capsules — do not readily 

 germinate, and, when they do, do not at once give rise to 

 anything like a young fern or to the seedling of an ordinary 

 plant. When sown on a moist surface in a damp, warmish 

 atmosphere, the spores of a fern (Fig. 7, A) give rise each 

 to a delicate hair-like filament (7) which pushes from one 

 end of the oblong spore (as shown in the drawings B, C, D). 

 It consists of a chain of " cells,'' nucleated corpuscles of 

 protoplasm, which multiply by transverse fission of the 

 leading cell (i, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the figure). In these delicate 

 cells appear rounded particles of leaf-green or chlorophyll, 

 that important substance by the aid of which green plants 

 feed on carbonic acid. These " first-threads " are so minute 

 as to be hardly noticeable, as they lie on the surface of the 



