The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1887-08-06 00:00:00

THE LAND OF FERNS.

One general principle of Nature seems to be that,
in lands where the sun is bright, the colours of
flowers and of birds are bright too. We know (says
the Gloie) it in the case of tropical birds, where the
plumage seems to northern eyes gaudy in its bril-
liancy. We know it even in the case of artificial
plumage—the dress of men, and especially of women.
The bright colours that fascinate the Neapolitans
belong to a climate where sea and sky alike
dazzle, and where even umbrellas and sunshades
ars, gaudy in their colouring., When we come
further north, colour abates, but Nature has her own
consolations. Colour is less brilliant, but form is
more beautiful, and its beauty more insisted on. Tree
life is lovelier than the arid Italian Campagna can
produce, and ferns are peculiarly abundant and
various. England is specially the land of ferns,
unless, indeed, the distinction should more properly
belong to that melancholy island along whose
western shores the waves of the Atlantic break
incessantly.
The difference between the flora of the two cum-
tries is very curious to note. That mild, damp,
insular climate, the prevalence of days which the
country people define as " moisht," gives Ireland its
6ebriquet of "Emerald," though strictly the greenness,
so insisted on and so remarkable, is due not so much
to the deeper hues of the grass as to the prevalence
of pasture over tillage, and the absence of manufac-
turing cities with their withering grime. But there
are whole tribes of plants that flourish with us, and
seem quite unable to thrive or ripen their seeds in the
Irish climate. Half the British leguminous plants
and nearly all the campanulas are missed by the
botanist who crosses the Irish Channel. The soil is
different; but it is not so much the difference of soil
as the exuberance of heaths, grasses, sedges, ferns,
and mosses that literally crowd the flower-bearing
plant out of the chance of existence. As a matter of
fast the catalogue of Irish ferns shows deficiency as
compared with our own, though there are one
or two Irish ferns which our country does
not produce. Perhaps nowhere is there FO
much richness and variety as among our English
lakes, and nowhere so much exuberance of
the commoner sorts as in the woods that line the
shores of Killarney. The caprice of nature is very
singular. Ihe little preen spleenwort, that is rather a
treasure trove by Kirkstone Pass, is as common in the
clefts and ledges of the rocks of the Ilia Male an is
the more beautiful and delicate black spleenwos:t in
any part of the three kingdoms.
It has long been the misfortune of the tribe of ferns
that their sponsors have been men of science. They
do not seem, up to the present, to have passed into
the lives and legends of the people. There is no
poetry about them, and no popularity. The classier
writers speek of them as only fit to be burned; and
Shakespeare scarcely alludes to them. "We have
the receipt of fern seed; we walk invisible," says
Gadshill in the Inn-yard at Rochester. It was the
uncanniness and not the beauty of the plants with
which Elizabethan audiences were familiar.

• "Why, did you think that you hid Gyger' ring,
Or the herb that gives invisibility ?"
says another poet of the same period in the Fair
Maid of the Inn," making probably a reference to the
the same superstitution. And yet Shakespeare
had a lover's eye for flowers, as their description
in " Hamlet " and "Winter's Tale " abundantly
proves. The ferns were neglected till the botanists
arose, and then came such a christening as was
enough to starve them out of all popularity. A.
few common names are, indeed, to be met with,
and, like most common names, are beautiful, or
else hold in them the remains of some popular
error of tradition. The Lady, the Shield, the Hart's
Tongue, the Wall Rue, the Oak, the Beach, the Pars-
ley—all of these are very general, and their names
seem to recommend them. The Maidenhair is a
word to be thankful for, and bracken is happy in its
sound and suggestion. But the botanists took their
own revenge, and contrived such a nomenclature as
the force of nature could scarcely support. One
thinks of these feathery stalks of the delicate colour of
tbe fronds daintily put forth where no other green
thing could find sustenance of earth and moisture,
and then one turns to such words as polypodium,
polyotichutn, blechnum, and hyrneno-phyllum. Surely
in science as well as in ignorance there is barbarism.

The special beauty of the fern is its form, and this
beauty it owes to one of its main distinctions from
all other kinds of plants. It is, to use the technical
word, an acrogen, that is to say, the growth of the
plant develops by addition to the extremities of it.
The sentence sounds difficult, but the process of
growth is very simple of understanding. The
frond makes its appearance first as a coil closely
rolled round, then the stem gathers strength and
the coil becomes a crozier' then gradually the
leaves unroll, the little side branches of the leaf
unrolling in their turn, till the whole front expands.
The leaves of all other plants are uniform throughout
in texture and Consistency. Each portion of the leaf
is developed along with the rest, and the growth is
general and continuous. The great beauty of fern
growth is that form asserts itself above colour. There
is Probably nothing more graceful in nature than
the curves and bends of a slowly growing fern
frond. And so, as we have said, all northern coun-
tries—countries that seem denied the beauty of
bright colour, abound in fern growth. In Egypt
there is one fern to 1000 plants, in Greece 1 t 6 225,
in France 1 to 63, in Scotland 1 to 30, in Greenland 1
to 10, and in the North Cape Ito 7. It will be
curious to see how far, as climatic changes alter the
greenness of Ireland and the growth of English pas-
tures, flowers may not dwindle in variety and ferns
increase for us our appreciation of a kind of beauty
which has hitherto been too much neglected.

THE greatest composer—sleep.
COLD comfort—iO3 in August.
IN a country newspaper we find the following cheery
passage: A number of deaths are unavoidably post-
poned.
ATASIDON journal says there is a knack in putting
on gloves. Come to think of it, that's so. You have
to get your hand in, as it were.
SHE: I don't see why women shouldn't make as
good swidurners as men. He: Yes, but you see a
swimmer has to keep his mouth shut.
• TETI me, Thomas, how many voyages round the
world did Captain Cook make ?—Three.—Correct,
and on which of these voyages was he killed?
RETURN Wanted—Of tho "burning questions" that
•end in smoke.

WHEN is a ;harp man apt to be mystified ?—When
he gets into a fog.
WHEREIN are a policeman and a rainbow alike ?
Both are tokens of peace, and usually appear after a
%tom.