Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tion stands out with perfect distinctness. At other times the eye is pleased by the wealth of beauty revealed to it by the crowding of graceful ferny forms upon open hillsides, over sunlit forest glades or upon the boulder-strewn expanse of some rugged moorland. The country which produces the most beautiful scenery, furnishes, in greatest abundance, the most lovely forms of fern life, and ferns lend additional beauty to lovely scenery. Yet ferns are often present in many places without being seen. They are so modest and retiring in habit that they frequently hide, so to speak, in the most sequestered nooks. But it ia always easy to find them when it is known where to look for them. Their powers of reproduction are so great, the infinitesimal spores are so easily wafted far and wide by the restless winds when the season of ripening has arrived and the bursting sporangia have set at liberty the multitudes, infinitely vast, of their imprisoned germs, that the presence even of the rarest ferns is always possible even in places least suspected to possess them. It may generally be assumed that wherever ferns have been once actually discovered they will be found again, if not in the immediate vicinity at least somewhere in the same neighbourhood. Even when well-known habitats of rare ferns have been stripped of all prominently visible specimens the old ferns taken away are almost certain to have had opportunities of shedding their spores before their removal; and in a year or two when the minute seedlings have had time to assume ferny forms they may be looked for in the same spots with a tolerable certainty of finding them, provided the conditions of growth have not been changed by an alteration in the character of the habitats. With regard to several species of British ferns...