28 HANDY BOOK OF 
of mould is deposited, which imperceptibly accumulates, and 
forms a soil for the reception of other mosses, and such 
diminutive plants as the Drapa verna, or Nailwort ; others 
of a larger growth succeed, and before much time has passed, 
wallflowers, and the elegant snapdragon, with ferns and 
harebells, wave in the soft summer air. The walls of the 
Jews' burying-ground, near the Queen's Elms, on the Ful- 
ham road, present a similar instance of vegetable develop- 
ment in its earliest and rudimental state. 
Two subjects for consideration are suggested by the men- 
tion of mosses, taken in connection with trees or shrubs, and 
each has reference to that appendage which generally, 
though not invariably, acts as an anchor to the plant. This 
appendage is the root; its fantastic form and tenacious 
grasp in various instances have been alluded to by poets and 
painters, and few, it may be, whose eyes are opened to admire 
the natural objects of creation, have not remarked the fine 
effect produced in broken foregrounds by the introduction of 
interlacing roots with ferns and mosses. Salvator llosa well 
knew the magic and truthfulness which they imparted, and 
many a painter since his time has visited the wildest soli- 
tudes of nature green lanes and time-worn quarries, over - 
grown with old trees in quest of such ; poets have sung 
concerning them, and none more graphically than our own 
Spenser and the Bard of Avon. Botanists, too, have loved 
to turn aside from the technicalities of science, to linger in 
imagination among forest walks, where moss-grown roots 
twist adown the banks, and are often embellished with 
primroses and bluebells. Strange it seems, that among the 
sons of Painting or of Song, none have cared to find a theme 
for sketching or description in the elegant moss root, which 
binds its parent to some storm-beaten rock. And yet the 
mystic apparatus of pipes and organs, of cells and vessels, 
equally exists in the minutest fibre of the Capillary Thread- 
moss smallest of British" mosses as in the sturdy root that 
sustains the loftiest oak. The machinery in each is similar ; 
