32 



BRITISH MOSSES. 



and in its depths the dormouse curls himself round and sleeps the winter 

 through. 



But more important uses are fulfilled by mosses in forming soil for larger 

 plants. A lichen is the first vegetable production to appear on the surface of a 

 rock. By its decay this forms sufficient soil for the lodgment of the spores of a 

 moss, and when in its turn the moss dies, the soil is deepened yet more, and pre- 

 pared for the nourishment of other plants. 1 For man's direct needs mosses do 

 but little. In former days they were used in medicine, but have long been laid 

 aside. A pillow stuffed with hypnum was thought to procure sleep, hence its name 

 from the Greek vttvoq, sleep. When in Lapland, Linnseus used a pillow and 

 mattrass stuffed with polytrichum, finding it, when dry, easily rolled up, light and 

 portable, and when required for use, only needing a wetting to make it soft and 

 elastic. Lapland mothers line their children's cradles with moss, and a North 

 American Indian mother fills a seal-skin bag with moss and other warm things, 

 then putting her baby into it, draws it up round its neck, and so keeps it winter- 

 proof. In the North of Europe the peasantry line their chimnies with the Fon- 

 tinaUs antvpyretica, from an idea that it will not blaze. Air-plants grow well in 

 sphagnum, and it is stuffed between the timbers of houses to deaden sound. Hugh 

 Miller 2 found in the Highlands that sphagnum steeped in tar was still used for 

 calking ships, a practice descending from the remotest antiquity. 3 Brooms and 

 brushes made of moss, probably polytrichum, are collected in the Industrial 

 Museum at Kew, from Hawkhead in Windermere, Munich, Berne, and Jamaica, 

 and they are also made in Cornwall. At Wallington in Northumberland, and in 

 Yorkshire, moss is platted into hassocks. As moss never takes mildew, it is useful 



meadow-sweet as closely resembles a flake of the foam of the brook it grows beside. Sea-shore 

 plants have mostly sea-green leaves ; while of the two characteristics of mountain vegetation, the 

 pine-tree and the moss, one but repeats the form of the other, and the same thought is echoed in 

 the tracery of the frost-work in the hollow of the mountain side. And have we not seen " snow- 

 drops " hanging their heads above the snow ? 



1 Under the highest powers of the microscope the seeds of a lichen only appear like fine dust, 

 while with a power of 220 the spores of a moss appear of the size of silkworms' eggs. It is pro- 

 bably from the greater minuteness of its seeds, which would therefore more easily find lodgement, 

 that the lichen grows first. 



2 My Schools and Schoolmasters. 3 My Schools and Schoolmasters. 



