4. At the ends of the stems, you will often find little structures, sometimes rather pink in colour, which look something like flowers (see fig. 130), but they are really quite different in their nature from true flowers.
Fig. 131. (a) The part of the Moss corresponding to the prothallium; (b) with the spore-capsule attached; (c) enlarged capsule, showing the covering; (d) naked capsule, showing the lid which falls off at (l).
5 and 6. There are no seeds and no seedlings.
7. At the top of some of those plants which seem to have flowers you will find later that a long slender stalk grows out with a little capsule or box at the end of it (see fig. 131 (b)). This single box or capsule really corresponds to the numbers of small spore-cases on the backs of fern-leaves, for it is in this capsule that we find the spores, which are simple and single-celled like those of the fern.
8. When these spores grow, however, they do not form a prothallium as they do in the ferns, but they grow out into the leafy moss-plant.
It is very difficult really to see how this can be the case, unless you study mosses very carefully with a microscope, but all the same it is true that the leafy moss-plant corresponds to the prothallium of the fern.
9. On the leafy moss-plant you find the simple stalk and capsule which gives rise to the spores; this spore forming part of the plant always remains attached to the leafy plant, so that we find the two portions of the plant in contact all their lives, and not separated as they are in the fern.