There are also great varieties of other kinds of Mosses, which grow on Trees, and several other Plants, of which I shall here make no mention, nor of the Moss growing on the skull of a dead man, which much resembles that of Trees.

Whether this Plant does sometimes originally spring or rise out of corruption, without any disseminated seed, I have not yet made trials enough to be very much, either positive or negative; for as it seems very hard to conceive how the seed should be generally dispers’d into all parts where there is a corruption begun, unless we may rationally suppose, that this seed being so exceeding small, and consequently exceeding light, is thereby taken up, and carried to and fro in the Air into every place, and by the falling drops of rain is wash’d down out of it, and so dispers’d into all places, and there onely takes root and propagates, where it finds a convenient soil or matrix for it to thrive in; so if we will have it to proceed from corruption, it is not less difficult to conceive,

First, how the corruption of any Vegetable, much less of any Stone or Brick, should be the Parent of so curiously figur’d, and so perfect a Plant as this is.  But here indeed, I cannot but add, that it seems rather to be a product of the Rain in those bodies where it is stay’d, then of the very bodies themselves, since I have found it growing on Marble, and Flint, but always the Microscope, if not the naked eye, would discover some little hole of Dirt in which it was rooted.

Next, how the corruption of each of those exceedingly differing bodies should all conspire to the production of the same Plant, that is, that Stones, Bricks, Wood, or vegetable substances, and Bones, Leather, Horns, or animate substances, unless we may with some plausibleness say, that Air and Water are the coadjutors, or menstruums, all kinds of putrifactions, and that thereby the bodies (though whil’st they retain’d their substantial forms, were of exceeding differing natures, yet) since they are dissolv’d and mixt into another, they may be very Homogeneous, they being almost resolv’d again into Air, Water, and Earth; retaining, perhaps, one part of their vegetative faculty yet entire, which meeting with congruous assistants, such as the heat of the Air, and the fluidity of the Water, and such like coadjutors and conveniences, acquires a certain vegetation for a time, wholly differing perhaps from that kind of vegetation it had before.

To explain my meaning a little better by a gross Similitude: 

Suppose a curious piece of Clock-work, that had had several motions and contrivances in it, which, when in order, would all have mov’d in their design’d methods and Periods.  We will further suppose, by some means, that this Clock comes to be broken, brused, or otherwise disordered, so that several parts of it being dislocated, are impeded, and so stand still, and not onely hinder its own progressive motion, and