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LICHEN AND MOSS GARDENS. 
or relaxation. However, we wait for Dr. Lindley's work, and trust that it may 
bring with it the dawn of luminous intelligence. 
With the two works named as prime instructors, we would suggest, as a com- 
panion, one of Ross's best single, mounted microscopes ; for with this abundance of 
specimens may be very easily examined, and the particulars noted down. Thus, a 
habit of research will be obtained, and its effects registered. 
Attendance at a course of good lectures on Physiology and Botany would much 
assist : but it is not indispensable, for experience has confirmed the fact, that, with 
a few books, a good instrument, and some natural specimens, obtainable even in the 
neighbourhood of large towns, a very competent knowledge of plants may be 
obtained without the aid of lecture or teacher. 
Let a taste for Botany be seen to increase, let persons be determined to know 
a little of those beauties which they now only look at, and then we shall have 
every one become his own Botanist, the founder of his own system, one who 
instructs himself without trammel or restraint. 
LICHEN AND MOSS GARDENS. 
It may be questionable whether the various flowers that lend their polished 
lustre to enamel the parterre, or the minute forms of vegetable life that flourish on 
the time-worn rock and aged tree, or spread their verdant forms beneath the more 
luxuriant herbage, are really more capable of affording pleasure to a mind finely 
strung for the perception of the beautiful in nature. The former are certainly 
more obtrusive, thrusting their charms more prominently and attractively before 
the eye of the passing observer ; but the wonderful variety, the microscopic 
minuteness, and beautiful proportion or wayward singularity, of the latter, are 
assuredly qualities of no mean or contemptible order, and can hardly fail to interest 
those who once stop to consider and examine them. 
Diminutive and insignificant as they may appear, they are far from being a 
cipher in the utility of the vegetable world. They rise and perish, forming in 
their decay a soil for the growth of vegetation of a higher order ; or, as in the 
Sphagnum palustre and a few others, contributing to the formation of vast 
morasses, which eventually furnish fuel to many districts. Their production only, 
or their more flourishing condition, on the northern aspect of the trunks of trees, 
long answered the purpose of a compass, to the wild untutored Indian, in threading 
his way through the trackless forests of America : the Cladonia rangiferina, or 
Reindeer Moss, is the sole support for months of the rein-deer in the snow-clad 
regions of Lapland ; and as that animal furnishes the main dependence for food to 
the inhabitants, this little plant, which bears its name, may thus be said to 
preserve the lives of thousands of our fellow- creatures. Others, again, as the 
