These flowerless plants are of much simpler structure than those which have root, stem, leaf and flower, and produce plants of their own kind by means of their seeds. If you look at the back of a common fern, you will see brown specks, not bigger than silkworms' eggs, beautifully arranged upon it. Each of these is a collection of little cases containing spores, which by-and-by will split open, allowing the spores to fall into the ground. "Then the spores are the same as seeds, after all"--you say. No; if they were seeds, each would at once grow into a fern. This is what happens, as far as I can explain it to you: from the spore springs a tiny leaf, which roots itself, and it is from this green leaf that the young fern actually grows, until it, as it were, begins life on its own account. The leaf dies down, and the first frond of the new fern peeps above ground, closely coiled up, as you have often seen, if you have been through the woods in spring-time. The earliest forms of vegetable life, then, brought forth by the earth at the word of God were the plants which have no seeds: botanists have divided such plants into groups--the seaweeds and lichens, the mosses, and the ferns. Of the seaweeds, the lowest of all groups of plants, we were speaking some time ago. The lichens, though such lowly plants, are very interesting, for I have read that every form of lichen is composed of two distinct plants--a seaweed and a fungus--so closely interwoven that you cannot tell where the one ends and the other begins. The lichens range in colour from white to yellow, red, green, brown--and some are as black as that rare black pansy of which I told you. Each kind has its own peculiar way of growing, and these hardy little plants can live where no other plant can--on the hard black lava, on naked rocks, and even upon the highest snow-mountain. Next time you pass an old gateway or ruined wall, and notice stains of yellow and brown and grey upon it, remember that there the lichens grow; tiny plants indeed, whose beauties are revealed only by the microscope, but each one of them made by God, and given the means of living by Him, just as much as those giants of the forest of which travellers tell us such wonderful tales. You may sometimes find a rock, or the trunk of a tree, encrusted with dry lichen, and it is interesting to know that these plants when they decay form the first mould for mosses and ferns, plants which botanists think of as higher in the scale of vegetable life than the lowly lichens themselves are. The great family of mosses is found not only near home, but even far away amid the icefields and the snow, where the reindeer searches with its horns for the white moss which is its food, and where Sir John Franklin and his devoted men gathered the black _Tripe de Roche_ upon which they tried to live during those dark months when their ship lay fast wedged between