Note 71 — Chapter VIII · THE GREAT ALEUTIAN CHAIN.

The range and diverse beauties of the numerous mosses and lichens on these islands must serve as an agreeable and interesting study to anyone who has the slightest love for nature. They undoubtedly formed the first covering to the naked rocks, after these basaltic foundations had been reared upon and above the bed of the sea—bare and naked cliffs and boulders, which with calm intrepidity presented their callous fronts to the powerful chisels of the Frost King. Rain, wind, and thawing moods destroyed their iron-bound strongness; particles larger and finer, washed down and away, made a surface of soil which slowly became more and more capable of sustaining vegetable life. “In this virgin earth,” says an old author, “the wind brings a small seed, which at first generates a diminutive moss, which, spreading by degrees, with its tender and minute texture, resists, however, the most intense cold, and extends over the whole a verdant velvet carpet. In fact, these mosses are the medicines and the nurses of the other inhabitants of the vegetable kingdom [in the North]. The bottom parts of the mosses, which perish and moulder away yearly, mingling with the dissolved but as yet crude parts of the earth, communicate to it organized particles, which contribute to the growth and nourishment of other plants. They likewise yield salts and unguinous phlogistic particles for the nourishment of future vegetable colonies, the seeds of other plants, which the sea and winds, or else the birds in their plumage, bring from distant shores and scatter among the mosses.” Then the botanist needs no prompting when he observes the maternal care of these mosses, which screen the tender new arrivals from the cold and imbue them with the moisture which they have stored up, and “nourish them with their own oily exhalations, so that they grow, increase, and at length bear seeds, and afterward dying, add to the unguinous nutritive particles of the earth; and at the same time diffuse over this new earth and mosses more seeds, the earnest of a numerous posterity.”