CHAPTER XXVI.
MOSSES AND THEIR RELATIVES
Mosses form another big family, the members of which are generally easy to recognise, even when you know little about them, because they all have a very strong family likeness. If you look for mosses in a shady wood, or on stones and tree stumps near a waterfall, you will often find large numbers of them growing together, sometimes forming sheets of soft green, covering the stones and earth and tree stumps. These luxuriant mosses grow, as a rule, in moist and shady places, but there are others which grow on dry walls or between the cobbles of little-used paths, and generally form brilliant green patches of tiny plants, like masses of velvet. If you pick out a separate plant from among these and look at it through a magnifying-glass, you will see that it is very like the bigger ones of the wood.
Fig. 130. A clump of Mosses, showing the flower-like appearance of the tips of their branches.
For our study it is perhaps better to choose one of the bigger ones, because all its parts show so clearly.
1. If you take a single plant, you will find that it appears to be marked out into root, stem, and leaves, though all these parts are small and simple.
2. The stem is delicate, and you will not be able to see any “water-pipe” cells when you examine it with your magnifying-glass.
3. The leaves are always very simple and small, generally narrow, pointed, and clustered thickly round the stem with no special leaf stalks.