The fungi cut a small figure in Shakespeare--i. e., considering their numbers and almost omnipresence. But we must remember that they were at that time studied by few, their significance and interest little suspected. They formed part of the realm of the world unseen; they came and went at the instance of powers unknown, mostly personified, imaginary, a misty population, the thought of which kept for long ages the childhood of our race in terror. Shakespeare saw the forms of unstudied plants, everything visible to the naked eye, and really omitted very little. He speaks of mosses--the lichens were included with them--chiefly as indicative of age in the object in which they rest: "Under an oak, whose boughs were mossed with age And high top bald with dry antiquity." Then again he simply touches them, but in such a way as to reveal his full appreciation of their beauty, as in Cymbeline, iv, 2. For the decoration of Imogen's grave the ruddock would bring flowers-- "... bring thee all this; Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none, To winter-ground thy corse." The "furred moss" to "winter-ground thy corse" is exquisite. Ferns, though so much larger, so handsome, and in our day so all-attractive, failed generally to impress our fathers. Butler, writing in 1670, has this to say: "They spring like fern, that infant weed, Equivocally without a seed, And have no possible foundation But merely in th' imagination." Now, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, ferns answered his purpose without seed just as well as with such visible means of perpetuity. His only reference is I Henry, iv, where Gadshill says: "We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible"; and Chamberlain replies: "Nay, by my faith, I think you are more belonging to the Night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible." In this connection Ellacombe suggests the doctrine of signatures. The God of Nature had written for us his human children prescriptions all over the leafy world. The remedy indicated by its form its own application. Thus a heart-shaped leaf was good medicine for cardiac troubles, a lung-like leaf was good for consumption, a lungwort in fact, and so a liverwort, a spleenwort, and the like. Gerarde, and, in fact, all the old medical writers throughout the centuries, are full of this. Now, what more natural than that a plant which could thus perpetuate itself age after age by means invisible should be able to confer the much-sought gift of invisibility, the power to disappear and reappear at pleasure? Many people so believed. Shakespeare appears to have been skeptical.