The Tripe de Roche consists of various species of Gyrophora--black, leather-like lichens, studded with small black points like coiled wire buttons, and attached by an umbilical root, or by short strong fibres to rocks on the mountains. Some of them bear no unapt resemblance to a piece of shagreen; while others appear corroded, like a fragment of burned skin, as if the rock on which they grew had been subjected to the action of fire. They are found in cold exposed situations on Alpine rocks of granite or micaceous schist, in almost all parts of the world--on the Himalayas and Andes as well as the British mountains. But it is in the Arctic regions alone that they luxuriate, covering the surface of every rock, to the level of the seashore, with a gloomy Plutonian vegetation that seems like the charred cinders and shriveled remains of former verdure and beauty. MOSSES --HUGH MACMILLAN Mosses belong to the foliaceous or highest division of flowerless plants. Although consisting entirely of cellular tissue and increasing by simple additions of matter to the growing point or apex of parts already formed, they point to far higher orders of vegetation; they are prefigurations of the flowering plants, epitomes of archetypes in trees and flowers. There is nothing in the appearance or structure of the lichens, fungi, or algæ to remind the popular mind of higher plants; they form, as it were, a strange microcosm of their own--a perfectly distinct and peculiar order of vegetable existence. But when we ascend a step higher and come to the mosses, we find for the first time the rudimental characters and distinctions of root, stem, branches, and leaves--we recognize an ideal exemplar of the flowering plants, all whose parts and organs are, as it were, sketched out, in anticipation, in these simple and tiny organisms. Through the small, densely cushioned, moss-like Alpine flowers, they approximate analogically to the phanerogamous plants in their leaves and habits of growth; and through the cone-like spikes of the club-mosses they approximate to the pine tribe in their fructification. From both these classes of highly organized plants, however, they are separated by wide and numerous intervening links. But still it is curious and interesting to find in them an exemplification of the universal teleology of nature--the humblest typical forms pointing to the grand archetypes, the simplest structures anticipating and prefiguring the most highly organized and complicated.