New York Botanical Garden Library 



3 5185 00232 7953 



The whole plant is not as large as the smallest letters used in 

 printing, and he must have crawled on his hands and knees to 

 see it ! They all grow on the ground in damp places, and live 

 through the winter till the muddy fields dry up. There are 

 about twenty different kinds of Moss-Brownies and each is as 

 different from the other, and as much an entity in miniature, 

 as Palmer Cox ever evolved from his fertile brain and pen. 



Closely related to the Bryums, but with larger leaves and 

 often bearing long, creeping runners, on which the leaves are 

 two-ranked, are the Mniums, filling in the crevices among the 

 roots of grass, under the shade of trees on lawns and roadside 

 banks, leaning over the side of the river and growing around 

 the roots of trees in wet woods. Mnium cuspidatum, may be 

 found fruiting in April or May, and is one of the prettiest as 

 well as the commonest of the genus, having been collected in 

 almost every State and Territory in the United States. Mnium 

 hornum and Mnium punctatum also grow in Bronx Park, but 

 none of them have any common names, though one might 

 readily be coined for them, the Starry Mosses, because they 

 have been called Astrophyllum, in reference to the rosettes of 

 leaves which surround the clusters of reproductive organs. 

 These are quite conspicuous in some of the species, giving a 

 dark eye to the rosette, like the Composites. Fifteen species 

 occur in the Eastern States, five having entire leaves, five with 

 single teeth on the edges of the leaves, and five with the teeth 

 double or in pairs. 



Another one of the Split-toothed Mosses is Fissidens. Three 

 species grow in Bronx Park, fruiting in fall and winter, 

 Fissidens minutulus, the small split-toothed moss, F. adiantoides, 

 the maiden-hair split-toothed moss, and F. taxifolius, the yew- 

 leaved split-toothed moss. All have their leaves in two flat 

 rows, overlapping each other closely, and all fruit abundantly 

 in wet woods and on stones along ditches and streams. They 

 also have a lovely red, starry fringe around the mouth of the 

 capsule, like the sea-anemones. 



There are a large number of creeping, side-fruited mosses allied 

 to the Hypnums which are are too difficult for the beginner to 

 recognize. The commonest are the Anomodons, T/ie/ias, Entodons 

 and Leskeas, but the Little-ladder Moss, Climacium Amertcanum, 

 anyone can know, as its tree-like stems may be seen in wet 

 woods and swamps, on rocks along streams, and it fruits in the 

 Boroughs of Richmond and the Bronx in the fall, and the 

 capsules stay on all winter. Its teeth are like little ladders. 



