205 
THE WINTER LIFE OF PLANTS. 
BY HARLAND COULTAS. 
T HE Winter landscape ps now spread before me. Every 
day the field of white snow-drifts which caps the Northern 
portion of our globe is extending at its circumference. The 
trees are deprived of their summer foliage, and the race of 
hardy evergreens appears to advantage. Only here and there 
a solitary late-blooming flower may be seen, and this at last 
disappears under the white snow-covering. Nature appears 
to be devoid of life, as though her pulse had ceased to beat ; 
and we are almost ready to imagine with the poet that the 
snowy mantle is a pall or winding-sheet thrown over her 
inanimate and motionless form. Never was there an idea more 
erroneous. The same formative laws which give to the falling 
snow-flake its beautiful crystalline forms still operate in the 
plant-world. 
We must, however, except the vegetation within the Arctic 
circle. The people there never see the sun for months, and 
without his influence the vegetable machinery will not work. 
It is, therefore, probable that the Polar plant-world, in all its 
forms, is in a complete state of torpor and inactivity in wintei', 
during the sun’s absence. 
But, in lower latitudes, where the sun continues for a few 
hours above the horizon in -winter, his rays are always diffusive 
of life, however obliquely they fall on the landscape. In all 
the lower forms of cryptogamic plants there is a considerable 
amount of active vegetation going forward. Mosses, liver- 
worts, and lichens are very retentive of life, and will grow at 
very low temperatures — even beneath the snow and ice with 
which they are covered, provided it is not too deep, so as to 
prevent the light from getting access to them. Many mosses 
and liverworts ripen their sporangia or come into fruit in 
winter. And, as for the lichens, winter is their vegetating 
period. In summer they are torpid and inactive. Lichens 
have been very appropriately named by Endlicher, Protoplvyta ,* 
* The term Protophyta is now, strictly speaking, applied to the very 
simplest plants, such as Protoccecus volvox, &c. &c., and not to the Crypto- 
gamia. 
