CHAPTER I. 
FERNS AND FERN>HUNTING : WHERE TO 
SEEK AND HOW TO KNOW THEM. 
ERNS [Filices) and their near relations the 
Mosses (Lycopods) and Marestails {Equiseta) 
have come down to ns from a period of the 
world’s history when flowering plants had 
probably not even commenced to appear — that 
first essential of floral existence, bright sun- 
shine, being shut off from the earth’s surface 
by a more or less dense and constant veil of 
cloudy vapour, floating in an atmosphere of 
probably tropical temperature. We have, indeed, to go back 
at least as far as the very earliest coal measures, in which 
we find the evidence of this in the shape of the veritable 
Fern fronds themselves, which, with their allies aforesaid, 
and others now extinct, grew in rank luxuriance, and have 
been transformed by time, heat, and pressure, into the very 
dissimilar lumps of black, shiny Wallsend, steam, or other 
coal which adds so materially in these latter days to our 
comfort and convenience. In the Coal Exchange, London, 
some very fine specimens of Fossil Ferns are exhibited, 
which, though of species peculiar to the age they lived in, 
resemble exactly their existing descendants in all essential 
characteristics. 
