III — Curly Grass Family
Schizæàceæ
Curly Grass. Schizàea Pusílla
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.)
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.