Hospital, and may be found on every rock-ledge, growing with 

 the hoary-leaved Hedwigia albicans, in Bronx Park. 



In the crumbling mortar of old walls and foundations, on the 

 corner of Lexington Avenue and Fiftieth Street, on various 

 ruins and deserted houses in the Borough of the Bronx, the 

 Cord-Moss, Funaria hygrometrica, may be found, readily known 

 by the way the pedicels of the capsules twist around each other 

 when dry, so that it is impossible to separate them without 

 decapitating them. The French call it "La Charbonniere," in 

 reference to its well-known preference for growing on charred 

 wood, and it might also well be called Cinderella, for it loves 

 ashes. The Top-Moss is its first cousin, and be found in the 

 spring-time, with numerous top-shaped capsules, in old flower- 

 beds and along ditches, and in wet fields. Its name is 

 Physcomitrium turbinatum, in reference to the shape of its capsules. 



It is not unusual to find also on old walls and in crumbling 

 mortar, the Wall-Moss, Tortula muralis, and even on the 

 ground, where old houses have stood, it grows abundantly in 

 Bronx Park. It leaves are a very bright-green, and rough with 

 fine papillae, like the surface of the tongue, and each tipped 

 with a long, slender bristle. Its teeth are curiously twisted, 

 hence its generic name, Tortula, and it belongs to the same 

 family as the Red-bearded Mosses, the Barbulas, some of which 

 also grow in waste places and on old walls. It is also found 

 associated with the bright-green cushions of the tiny Weisia 

 viridula, the green moss; its leaves are such a bright, joyful 

 green. They all fruit in winter or very early spring, 'and fruit 

 abundantly, so that the capsules stand up all over the tufts, 

 like bristling porcupine quills. 



The "Brownies " of the moss world are everywhere, but few 

 people know them or see them. In my own garden, under the 

 shade of the grasses on the lawn, they fruited last fall ; and in 

 all the muddy, grassy fields around the museum in Bronx 

 Park, they may be found. Under the alders in the bog- 

 garden, the smallest of them all and the shortest-lived one, 

 Ephemerum spinulosum, was found, full of tiny globose, orange 

 capsules. In fact, nature has compensated them for their 

 small size and ephemeral lives by giving them a sure means of 

 reproduction, large, horny, warty spores, almost the largest 

 known in any of the mosses. To that class belong the 

 Pleuridiums, the As to mums, the Bruchias, and the Nanomitriums, 

 one of which enjoys the honor of only having been found once 

 by C. F. Austin, who deserved to be called "sharp-eyed." 



