Eeport on Botany. 



153 



or group. But iu these later days the facilities for the study 

 of cryptogamic plants have been so increased by improve- 

 ments in microscopes that the realm of botanical investiga- 

 tion has been widely extended, and now no small part of 

 the attention of botanists is devoted to the exploration of 

 those hidden fields which the microscope reveals and makes 

 accessible. Here we are ushered, as it were, into a new 

 world of beauty and of wonder, here is opened a door 

 within whose portals we may find abundant food for thought 

 and marvelous evidences of wisdom and design that chal- 

 lenge our highest admiration. Accustomed as we are to 

 consider these diminutive plants as very low in the scale 

 of being, it is with no little gratification that we find them 

 endued with characters so varied and yet so constant as to 

 afford abundant means for systematic classification and 

 specific identification. Though they may be of less direct 

 value than other plants in an economic point of view, still 

 they are not without value and some on the other hand are 

 not to be deemed wholly uninjurious. The attacks of the 

 injurious ones are more to be feared because they are the 

 attacks of a hidden enemy. So minute are the germs, so 

 secret their dissemination, so untraceable their move- 

 ments and so immense their numbers that it is difficult to 

 contend with them. Similar relations exist in the animal 

 kingdom. Thus we sutler greater pecuniary loss from the 

 ravages of such minute creatures as the wheat midge and 

 the Hessian fly than from the inroads of larger but less nu- 

 merous depredators. Numbers avail more than strength. 

 Canada thistles and white daisies are less to be dreaded by 

 the farmer than the rusts and smuts of the grain fields. 

 Such considerations ought to have some influence in direct- 

 ing attention to the development of the science of crypto- 

 gamic botany. As an indication of an increasing interest 

 in this direction we may briefly refer to the following pub- 

 lications of the past year. 

 Trans. viii.~\ 20 



