"Break the first brake you see, Kill the first snake you see, And you will conquer every enemy."
[Illustration: Osmunda cinnamomea, var. _glandulosa_ (From Waters's "Ferns," Henry Holt & Co.)]
Var. _frondòsa_ has its fronds partly sterile below and irregularly fertile towards the summit.
Var. _incìsa_ has the inner pinnules of some of the pinnæ more or less cut-toothed.
Var. _glandulòsa_ has glandular hairs on the pinnæ, rachis and even the stipes of the sterile frond. This is known only on the coastal plain from Rhode Island to Maryland.
Small, slender ferns with linear or thready leaves, the sterile, one to two inches high and tortuous or "curled like corkscrews"; fertile fronds longer, three to five inches, and bearing at the top about five pairs of minute, fruited pinnæ. Sporangia large, ovoid, sessile in a double row along the single vein of the narrow divisions of the fertile leaves, and provided with a complete apical ring. (_Schizæa_, from a Greek root meaning to split, alluding to the cleft leaves of foreign species.)
[Illustration: Curly Grass. _Schizæa pusilla_]
The curly grass is so minute that it is difficult to distinguish it when growing amid its companion plants, the grasses, mosses, sundews, club mosses, etc. The sterile leaves are evergreen. Pine barrens of New Jersey, Grand Lake, Nova Scotia, and in New Brunswick. Several new stations for the curly grass have recently been discovered in the southwest counties of Nova Scotia by the Gray Herbarium expedition, mostly in bogs and hollows of sandy peat or sphagnum.
"And where upon the meadow's breast The shadow of the thicket lies." BRYANT.
Fronds slender, climbing or twining, three to five feet long. The lower pinnæ (frondlets) sterile, roundish, five to seven lobed, distant in pairs with simple veins; the upper fertile, contracted, several times forked, forming a terminal panicle; the ultimate segments crowded, and bearing the sporangia, which are similar to those of curly grass, and fixed to a veinlet by the inner side next the base, one or rarely two covered by each indusium. (From the Greek meaning like a willow twig [pliant], alluding to the flexible stipes.)
[Illustration: Climbing Fern. _Lygodium palmatum_]