These cryptogams or flowerless plants occur in far greater numbers in the world than flowering plants, but their size in most cases is very much less. Many individuals are so small, as in the case of bacteria, that a single one can only be seen after it has been magnified many hundreds of times by the microscope. Of the cryptogams some of the largest, certainly the most beautiful, and probably the best known are
THE FERNS
In nearly all woods one may find delicate feathery plants with graceful, usually much divided leaves that nearly always start up from the ground like a slowly opening, but somewhat fuzzy coil. ([Figure 62].) Ferns, at least most of those that grow in America, uncoil their leaves in this way, almost without exception. The accompanying figure shows the procedure, and in addition to this character one may hunt in vain for flowers.
While they bear no flowers we already know that nature could not leave them with no means of reproduction without abandoning them to a childless old age and the consequent extinction of the race of ferns. So far from the truth is this that ferns make up a goodly proportion of the world’s vegetation, and there are many hundreds of different kinds known. The lack of flowers, of course, explains why ferns do not bear seeds which are matured in a fruit or ripened ovary.
On the back of the leaves of most ferns, along or near the edges of the finer subdivisions, one may
