We burn them now, in our grates, the progenitors of these feeble things lying here, limply, in my palm. Is it not, as I said, a wonderful history the frail thing has. A degenerate stock, botanists call it. So are its cousins the ferns degenerate, with no botanical Nordau to sound warning against them. But degenerates tho’ they all are, they have still the spirit of the pioneer. They dwell in the outposts of vegetable civilization. We do not find them flourishing where Nature is in her gentlest moodsOnce, down in the crater of an active volcano, half-a-mile from any soil, growing from a sulphur-stained black-lava floor, I found a clump of waving green ferns, as high as my head, spreading out their broadfronds as though to cover and hide the terrible nakedness of the unfinished earth. A thousand years from now a grain-field may spread where now those frail green plumes have just begun their gracious work.