PRICKLY CLUB-MOSS. 
373 
Its range in Europe is not extensive, being almost exclusively 
confined to northern and alpine districts : it is recorded as a 
native of North America, but not having seen specimens, and 
having often felt doubts as to the identity of the North- American 
species bearing names identical with ours, I refrain from giving 
an opinion. 
Lycopodium Selaginoides was well known to Ray, who con- 
sidered it generically distinct from all the other British l^yco- 
podia,^ in which Dillenius appears to agree with him.f The 
figure^ by Dillenius is not inaccurate, but wants that elegance 
which is so characteristic of the majority of his figures : the 
other figures of our earlier botanists convey little or no idea of 
the characters of the plant. The figure in Sowerby’s ‘ English 
Botany ’ § is tolerably accurate. 
The roots are extremely slender, thread-like and fragile ; they 
take but a slight hold on the crumbling soil in which this spe- 
cies is usually found. 
The stem is procumbent, very slender, weak, repeatedly 
branched ; the branches short and somewhat sinuous : the seed- 
bearing spikes are thrown up at intervals, generally two or three 
on each plant ; they are subclavate, and considerably thicker 
than the prostrate stem. 
The entire plant is clothed with lanceolate leaves, which are 
serrated and almost jagged at their edges; those on the pro- 
cumbent slender portions of the stem are shorter, narrower and 
somewhat scattered, while those on the spike, more properly 
termed bracts, are every way larger and much broader at the base. 
The capsules are sessile at the base of the bracts, pale yellow 
and tolerably round ; the upper ones contain the usual minute 
pollen-like particles which have already been spoken of as the 
seeds of Lycopodium clavatum^ used under the name of ^ plaun ’ 
for the production of flashes of light ; the lower ones contain 
larger grains, equal in size to the seed of many phsenogamous 
plants. This double mode of fructification has excited the 
admiration of botanists from the earliest period, and given rise 
to a variety of conjectures : some have contended that both the 
large and small grains are productive seeds ; others that the 
Syu. 106. f Hist. Muse. 460. 
§ Eng. Bot. 1148. 
I Id. tab. 68. 
