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: " To point out, perchance, some flower or weed too fair Either to he divided from the place On which it grew, or to he left alone To its own beauty. Many such there were, Fair Ferns and flowers, and chiefly that tall Fern So stately, of the Queen Osmunda named ; Plant lovelier, in its own retired abode, On Grassmere's beach, than Naiad by the side Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere, Sole sitting by the shores of old romance." Our Yorkshire rambles supplied us with specimens of the last order of Ferns, the Ophioglossaceae. In the hilly field beyond our favourite wood we found the curious Adder's-tongue (Ophioglossum vulgatum, Plate I V.,Jig. 8). It consists of a broad sheathing leaf or frond, and a tongue formed of a double row of spores shooting up from its centre, somewhat in the style of the wild Arum. I had seen this strange Fern in Wiltshire some years before; an old woman, a dealer in simples, had taken me with her to gather it. It was growing then, as now, in a pasture field; but she knew its situation perfectly, and parted the long grass at exactly the spot where the sheath-like frond was standing. She concocted a kind of ointment from the plant. In some other fields wefound the Moonwort (Botrychium lunaria, Plate IV., Jig 7). It has a double row of cres- scent shaped dentated leaflets, each marked with a darkstain in the shape of a horse's shoe. This plant bears its seed in a branched cluster; like the Osmunda, it is used in medicine by village doctresses, and there is a superstition that it will open locks, and cause horses to cast their shoes. 1. OPHIOGI.OS8CM. 2. BOTKYCHIUM. The Jersey Adder's tongue (0. lusitanicum, Plate IV., Jig. 9), differs from the common one in being smaller, and having its fronds narrower, more numerous, and not in a shea...