4 



BRITISH MOSSES. 



on the highest plant-line of Chimborazo, 1 another is among the five which Dr. 

 Hooker discovered at the "Ultima Thule of antarctic vegetation, Cockburn Island, 

 lat. 60° 24' S." 2 Going northwards, the list of mosses appended to Sir J. Franklin's 

 " Journey to the Polar Sea," consists of British species ; among them being some 

 of the fork mosses, which grow in thick tufts, called by the Indians " Women's 

 Heads," because they say, " when you kick them they never get out of the way." 

 The earliest plants to spring from the bare rock, the first to clothe the soil after the 

 burning of the forest, the last to linger in the recesses of the cavern, the latest in 

 the year to flourish and bear fruit ; heeding not the mountain storm, nor the arctic 

 snow, nor the poverty of the soil, nor the darkness of the cave, nor the dreariness 

 of the winter, the moss defies also the burning sun of the tropics. And there it 

 has made the desert rejoice, and by its beauty has roused the fainting courage of 

 the wanderer, as Mungo Park has told us of himself. By strange contrast the 

 moss 3 which he saw in the dry and sandy waste chooses for itself in England the 

 most cool and damp habitations ; and we have no law which will account to us for 

 the fact that these plants which, of all others, are the most sensitive to atmospheric 

 influences, should at the same time be found in every variety of climate. It must 

 be placed with those other mysteries, the love of the vervain and the henbane 

 for human habitations, and the attachment of the plantain to the Englishman ; but 

 of this we are sure, that when the moss was set in the desert 5000 years before, 

 He who bade it spring knew to what end its exquisite fashioning should serve. 



Universally distributed over the earth, and some species found in all parts of 

 it, mosses seem especially to love cold and moisture, and their homes are therefore 

 pre-eminently the arctic and temperate zones, and the heights in the torrid which 

 correspond with these in climate. As, therefore, we advance to the higher 

 latitudes, or mount to greater elevation, we find the proportion of mosses and 

 lichens to the other forms of plants increase, until they compose the whole of the 

 vegetation ; and in going back in creation's story, we learn that the moss type of 

 plant has only very recently been introduced upon the earth, when its temperature 

 was gradually lowering. 



1 Ortholrychum phyllanthum. — Wilson's Bryologia Britannica. 



2 Bryum argenteum. — Humboldt's Aspects of Nature, vol. ii. 



3 Fissidens (Dicranum) bryoides. — Hooker's British Flora, vol. ii. pt. i. 



