[Illustration: 1. THE COMMON LOBSTER. 2. HERMIT CRAB.]
These Couch Grasses and Dune Grasses, as they are often called, are
coarse and hard. Cattle pass them by in disgust. Yet they are the most
useful plants on the shore. They can live and spread where other plants
die. They have very long underground stems, which go through and through
the dry, loose sand. The wind does its best to bury them in sand, but
they send up hard, sharp buds, and go on living, and spreading.
Bit by bit, the sand is held together by the matted stems of these
grasses. It becomes firm, instead of loose; the wind can no longer blow
it about. Then other plants can grow in that place. You know how men go
out to the wild parts of the earth and, by hard work, make those places
ready for others to settle there. Well, the sand-grass works like that.
It prepares the way for useful plants to grow in places where they could
not grow before.
Quite near to the sea we shall find a very strange little plant. It has
no leaves, only fleshy, jointed stems. It is known as the Glass-wort,
being full of a substance useful in making glass.
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