Of course the whole country was awfully wild when the continents first came out of the sea, but that just suited Mr. Lichen, for there is one thing he can't stand, and that is city life, with its smoke and bad air.
"Why, one can't get one's breath!" he says.
WHY THE LICHENS DISLIKE CITY LIFE
So, while you will not meet Mr. Lichen in cities—at least, until after the people are all gone; that is to say, on ruins of cities of the past—you will find him beautifying the ancient walls of abbeys, old seats of learning like Oxford, and the tombstones of the cities of the dead.
Mr. Lichen always travels light. On the surface of the lichens are what seem to be little grains of dust, and these serve the purpose of seeds. A puff of wind will carry away thousands of them, and so start new colonies in lands remote.
You see, the fact that he requires so little baggage must have been a great advantage to Mr. Lichen in those early days, when he had to discover not only America but all the rest of the world map, spread out so wide and far. You can just imagine how the grains of lichen dust, the seed of the race, must have gone whirling across the world with the winds.
But if a breath of wind would carry them away so easily, how could they stay on a rock, these tiny lichen travellers? Especially as they have no roots? They have curious rootlike fibres which absorb food by dissolving the rock, and this dissolved rock, hardening, holds them on. The fibres of lichens that grow on granite actually sink into it by dissolving the mica and forcing their way between the other kinds of particles in the rock that they can't eat. Thus they help break it up.
As we all know, little people are great eaters in proportion to their size, but it is said the lichens are the heartiest eaters in the world. They eat more mineral matter than any other plant, and all plants are eaters of minerals.
Yet, you'd wonder what they do with the food they eat—most of them grow so slowly. A student of lichens watched one of them on the tiled roof of his house in France—one of the kind of lichens that look like plates of gold—and in forty years he couldn't see that it had grown a single bit, although he measured it carefully.