10 
THE STRUCTURE OF MOSSES. 
I also enclose for the kind acceptance of the Society, a 
specimen, with slice to show its structure, of Suberites Wilsoni, 
a beautifully carmine-coloured sponge which occurs in pyra¬ 
midal masses, sometimes upwards of fifteen inches high, on 
the south coast of Australia, and which, among other species, 
was sent to me by J. Bracebridge Wilson, M.A., F.L.S., of 
the Church of England Grammar School, Geelong, Victoria 
Colony, after whom I have named and described it. 
It is sufficiently different from the Alcyonium purpureum 
of Lamarck, which also came from Australia, as I learn from 
the type-specimen of the latter in the British Museum, to 
constitute a new species, and was dredged up by Mr. Wilson, 
with the rest, off Port Philip Heads in about nineteen 
fathoms. 
ON “ THE STRUCTURE OF MOSSES.” 
BY F. T. MOTT. 
Dividing the vegetable kingdom primarily into 
Plnenogams and Cryptogams, and subdividing 
the Cryptogams into three classes, viz.,Vascular 
Acrogens, Cellular Acrogens, and Thallogens, 
the mosses stand in the group of Cellular Acro¬ 
gens, and at the head of that group. They are 
the most highly organised of all the purely 
cellular plants. Below them are the Hepaticae, Lichens, 
Fungi, and Algae ; above them the vascular Cryptogams, 
Lycopods, Horsetails, and Ferns, and then the great host of 
the Phaenogams. 
As Cellular Acrogens they should consist of soft cellular 
tissue, increasing only at the growing points. But Nature 
draws no hard and fast lines. She is infinite and we are 
finite, and our attempts to map out the infinite are always 
baffled. 
These highest Cellular Acrogens are not always cellular. 
There is in the stems of many species a central thread of 
narrow elongated cells approaching to fibro-vascular tissue, 
and the cortical cells are often thickened with woody matter 
so as to form a rigid bark. There is another point in which 
Mosses are more nearly allied to the orders above them than 
to those below them—this is in the phenomenon of alter- 
* Transactions of Section D of the Leicester Literary and Philo¬ 
sophical Society. Bead February 19th, 1884. 
