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every day cares of a busy life, and nothing is so likely to do this as some pursuit that not only engrosses the attention but also gladdens the eye, that calls forth healthy thought, educates the observing faculties, and stimulates us to take a certain amount of invigorating exercise. To any person with ordinary enthusiasm, interest, and industry, the study of the mosses will yield all this and more.
Too frequently these plants are neglected by even professed botanists. The investigation of them is considered to be too difficult, or too tedious, and often too expensive. That there are difficulties connected with the study all must admit, but none that a little patience and industry will not surmount; the tedium of the study would evaporate after the first few hours' examination of these beautiful organisms, and the expense after the first outlay need not he more than a little extra wear and tear of one's shoe leather,
To say that the study of these plants is interesting would be trite, for everything in beautiful nature is interesting, but the "dim world of weeping mosses" is wondrously interesting; so varied in structure, in form, in mode of growth, in colour, covering the bosom of their mother earth with a green, velvety mantle when the cold winds of autumn and winter have robbed the trees of their beautiful foliage, and the nipping frosts have chilled into death their lovely sisters, the flowering plants, clothing with beauty the wayside bank, clinging with a tender embrace to their high-born kinsman the forest tree, bedecking with a thousand fairy urns the old ruined wall, covering with beautifully mingled masses of feathery Hypnum, tufted Bryum, or hoary Tortula, of every shade of green, the rotting thatch of the ruined cottage, filling the treacherous bog with pale green Sphagnum, er beautiful tussocks of noble looking Polytrichum, flourishing amid the unpleasant odours of the poison breathing marsh, and climbing slowly, but surely, from the lowest valley to the snow line of the great mountain!
And were we to follow them in their daring scramble, and note them well, we should see that the mosses are not only countless in numbers, but multitudinous in varieties and species; the moss flora of our own islands alone numbering about 140 genera and nearly 600 species, besides varieties without end. A superficial observer would probably be astonished if he were to have pointed out to him the varied species to be found upon a few square feet of a bank "with bright green mosses clad," because to him a moss is a moss and nothing more; and yet in such a limited area twenty or more species may often be found; and many a district that at first sight seems able to yield but a poor moss flora may by a little diligence be proved to be quite prolific. A limited district of some 3,500 acres has yielded the writer nearly 130 species of these plants, all of them beautiful and some of them very rare.
Then it must be remembered that mosses are easily preserved, usually retain their special characters even when dried, may be prepared for the herbaria, and packed in comparatively small compass, and may be examined at any time: for, however shrivelled they may have become by long keeping, a few minutes' soaking in tepid water will restore them