or the old brick: To think of the quantity of pleasure one has had
in one's life from that emerald green velvet,--and yet that for the first
time to-day I am verily going to look at it! Doing so, through a pocket
{14} lens of no great power, I find the velvet to be composed of small
star-like groups of smooth, strong, oval leaves,--intensely green, and much
like the young leaves of any other plant, except in this;--they all have a
long brown spike, like a sting, at their ends.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.]

5. Fastening on that, I take the Flora Danica,[7] and look through its
plates of mosses, for their leaves only; and I find, first, that this
spike, or strong central rib, is characteristic;--secondly, that the said
leaves are apt to be not only spiked, but serrated, and otherwise
angry-looking at the points;--thirdly, that they have a tendency to fold
together in the centre (Fig. 1[8]); and at last, after an hour's work at
them, it strikes me suddenly that they are more like pineapple leaves than
anything else.

And it occurs to me, very unpleasantly, at the same time, that I don't know
what a pineapple is!

Stopping to ascertain that, I am told that a pineapple belongs to the
'Bromeliaceae'--(can't stop to find out what that means)--nay, that of these
plants "the pineapple is the representative" (Loudon); "their habit is
acid, their leaves rigid, and toothed with spines, their {15} bracteas
often coloured with scarlet, and their flowers either white or blue"--(what
are their flowers like?) But the two sentences that most interest me, are,
that in the damp forests of Carolina, the Tillandsia, which is an
'epiphyte' (_i.e._, a plant growing on other plants,) "forms dense festoons
among the branches of the trees, vegetating among the black mould that
collects upon the bark of trees in hot damp countries; other species are
inhabitants of deep and gloomy forests, and others form, with their spring
leaves, an impenetrable herbage in the Pampas of Brazil." So they really
seem to be a kind of moss, on a vast scale.

6. Next, I find in Gray,[9] Bromeliaceae, and--the very thing I
want--"Tillandsia, the black _moss_, or long moss, which, _like most
Bromelias_, grows on the branches of trees." So the pineapple is really a
moss; only it is a moss that flowers but 'imperfectly.' "The fine fruit is
caused by the consolidation of the imperfect flowers." (I wish we could
consolidate some imperfect English moss-flowers into little pi