86 THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 
lamprey. Mr. Le Soeuf exhibited a singularly beautiful green 
lizard——NVaultinus elegans—from the North Island of New 
Zealand; it is an exceedingly rare reptile, and is fast dis- 
appearing ; also a large carnivorous land gsnail—Varaphanta 
busbyi—from North Island, New Zealand; also a wingless 
carnivorous cricket—//emidina thoracica—from North Island, 
New Zealand. These exhibits proved of great interest, and 
attracted much attention. Master Oliver Edwards—collection 
of beetles, etc., collected at Wamberal. 
Lecrure.—The Rev. W. W. Watts, M.A., delivered a 
most interesting lecture on ‘‘Mosses,’’ and illustrated his 
subject with excellent diagrams and some hundreds of ex- 
hibits consisting of Mosses not only from Australia, but dif- 
ferent parts of the world. 
LECTURE ON MOSSES. 
[Rev. W. W. Watts, M.A.) 
Ar the last monthly meeting the Rev. W. W. Watts gave a 
lecture on Mosses. ‘The following is a synopsis of the lec- 
ture:——Mosses were Cryptogams. The Cryptogams were not 
“flowerless’’—all the mosses had flowers ; neither was it al- 
together true that cryptogamic flowers were invisible to the 
naked eye,the male flower of many mosses was quite visible 
without even the aid of a lens. The distinctive character of 
the Cryptogams was that they were propogated by spores, and 
that they were characterised by “alternation of generations,”’ 
which meant that the life history of the Cryptogam exhibited 
two distinct and successive plant-forms—the form that bore 
the male and female flowers (called the first, or sexual, gene- 
_ ration) and the form that produced the spores (the second, 
or asexual, generation). The spore, when in contact with the 
moist ground or other substratum, expanded, in the case of 
the Ferns into a minute film, called the prothallium, and in 
the case of the Mosses into, for the most part, a threadlike 
growth, called the Protonema. In the case of the ferns, the 
prothallium bore, on its underneath surface, the flowers, and 
this constituted the first generation; and out of this sprang 
the fern as we saw it with the naked eye—the spore-bearing 
plant, or second generation. In the case of the Mosses, the 
plant as visible to the eye bore the flowers, while from it 
there grew up a separate form topped with a capsule that 
pore the spores. The plant itself sprang up from a joint in 
the protonema. 
