Sometimes people are deceived by what is called the “flowering fern,” and expect that it will have flowers. In this fern we find that all the spore-cases grow together on a special leaf, which is so covered by them that it looks quite different from a usual one, and is called the flower, though it is not one. In all other ways the story of the spore building and growth is like that of usual ferns. In our study of ferns, you see that they have many characters which are exceedingly different from either the flowering plants or pine-trees. In fact, they are so different that we require to add some new points to our list of characters for family divisions, which are:-- 7. ~Instead of flowers there are little spore-cases, which contain a number of simple one-celled spores.~ These are generally found on leaves which are otherwise like the rest of the leaves of the plant. 8. ~Each spore grows out to form a small green structure, which differs from the parent, and which we call the prothallium.~ 9. ~The new fern-plant grows at first attached to the prothallium~, but soon grows out beyond it, and is quite independent. What we call “ferns” are not the only plants which belong to this big family, for the club-mosses and also the horsetails have almost the same arrangement for their building of new plants. Our character-points (7) (8) and (9) apply to them, even though the rest of their structures appear to be so different from the ferns. They are, therefore, put in the same big family with the ferns, though they have smaller classes for themselves apart from the true ferns. Neither the ferns nor their near relatives are very important in the vegetation of to-day, but very long ago they were among the chief plants in the world, and grew to be as big as forest trees. Even then, however, they had almost the same way of forming spores that they have to-day, a fact which still marks them out as a family different from all the other families of plants. CHAPTER XXVI. MOSSES AND THEIR RELATIVES =Mosses form another big family=, the members of which are generally =easy to recognise=, even when you know little about them, because they all have a very strong family likeness. If you look for mosses in a shady wood, or on stones and tree stumps near a waterfall, you will often find large numbers of them growing together, sometimes forming sheets of soft green, covering the stones and earth and tree stumps. These luxuriant mosses grow, as a rule, in moist and shady places, but there are others which grow on dry walls or between the cobbles of little-used paths, and generally form brilliant green patches of tiny plants, like masses of velvet. If you pick out a separate plant from among these and look at it through a magnifying-glass, you will see that it is very like the bigger ones of the wood. [Illustration: Fig. 130. A clump of Mosses, showing the flower-like appearance of the tips of their branches.]