Bright are the flowers of the earth, the first and choicest of ornaments. Pure, simple, and holy, their charms can never decay, though familiarity and inconsistency may vulgarise, and innumerable misappropriations make us sometimes wish for the contrasts that other less showy objects would afford. While the fields are radiant with their beauty, and the gentle zephyrs fragrant with their scented odours, the great tide ebbs and flows over the flowerless plants of the sea. Around the huge rocks the perennial fringes of olive fuci undulate in graceful folds among the swelling waves, and the tall tangle bows its pliant stem as

“The ocean old,—
Centuries old,—
Strong as youth, and as uncontrolled,
Paces restless to and fro,
Up and down the sands of gold.”

For ages have the weeds of the sea been heedlessly disregarded or despised. The vilest epithet the polished Roman knew was alga projecta vilior. Horace, too, wrote alga inutilis; and there may yet be many to exclaim with the Scotch professor of the last century, “Pooh, pooh, sir! only a bundle of sea-weeds!” But when the apostle Peter slept at the house of Simon the tanner he dreamt a great dream—a dream memorable to the end of time—a dream that was a waking truth to be set in golden letters, and engraven on the hearts of rich and poor, wise and unwise—“There is nothing common nor unclean.”

The Chinese believe there is one word expressive of all excellence, so exquisite that no one can pronounce it, although it can be written and perceived by the eyes. That word is stamped alike on “the vile sea-weed” and on the lovely flower. I do not claim for both an equal rank,—the cottage may be charming, and not vie with the palace; and “the pride of the village” may want the grace of “the ladye of high degree,”—but I do claim for the neglected vegetation of the seaside an elegance of form, and structure, a suggestiveness of mathematical designs, a poetry of association and typical expression, a simplicity and modest gracefulness, which will entitle it to the best consideration of the designer.

World-wide in distribution, the sea-weeds are accessible to every one; and it is not the rarest that are, for ornamental purposes, the most valuable. The beauty of a manuscript tempted England’s greatest monarch to the acquirement of letters, and the commonest weed may be the incentive to the perusal of one of Nature’s choicest books. Wherever the briny waters wash the coasts, in marshes even where the salt sea penetrates but seldom in the year, on rocks and stones, and piers and piles, winter or summer, from the land of gold to the Canaries, from the soil of the Hottentot and Caffre to the ice-bound country of the Lapp, from the floating meadows of the tropics to the snowy regions of the poles—there grow the crisp sea-weeds—there may be gathered in endless variety the chastest patterns of simplicity. All the associations of the sea are grand and glorious, and the goddess of beauty came from the foam of its waves. In the sublime language of ancient mythology, the Ocean was the first-born of Heaven and Earth, that was wedded to the child of the land and the sky. Are there no gems of classic imagery in the bronzed belt that girdles its giant form? Have the thousand daughters of Atlas and Tethys all taken to groves and cities, and have the Nereides become the attendants of Flora? Are the tears of Calypso and the loves of Amphitrite forgotten? Has the memory of Sappho passed for ever away, and have the green and olive nurslings of the surge no affinity with the crystal phœnix that arose from their ashes in the Phœnicians’ fire?

There is a point whence life and vegetation seem to diverge—the simple cell; where the algæ meet the monads, and most mysterious processes and elaborations are carried on by means the simplest but most astounding. Of cell upon cell are the sea-weeds built, and by cells or spores cast loose from their substance are their species reproduced, as certainly and as surely as plants by the marriage of the flowers. Of cellular tissue entirely does the sea-weed consist; of cell upon cell alone is woven all the varied drapery of the deep. A mere sac, empty, or containing a fluid or granular substance, absorbs the surrounding fluids, assimilates them in its membranous walls, consolidates their carbon and nutritious substances, grows, divides, each portion swells again to its parent size, each again divides, and so the splitting cells increase and multiply. The rapidity with which some of the common confervæ of our ponds are thus developed is well known; and it is not unusual to find loathsome pools, that were black at dawn with decomposing filth, covered at eve with a floating verdure rapidly and energetically extracting its nutriment out of the pollution, and liberating the gas of animal life—oxygen—into the atmosphere, in lieu of pestilential effluvia. The snow-plant, the Protococcus nivalis, is perhaps the best-known instance of the rapid development of cell-plants properly so called. In a few hours whole tracts of the white snow of northern lands will assume the hue of the battle-field; and from another species the waters of the Arabian Gulf have acquired their memorable name of Red Sea.

Above the limits of the lichen incrusting the peaks of mountains, and in the unplumbed abysses of the deep below the region of the nullipore, there the cell-plants swarm by myriads; and even the air powders the ropes of ships at sea with the atomic dust that had vegetated among the clouds.

I have claimed for the sea-weeds the attractions of simplicity, and I claim beauty of outlines and gracefulness of forms even for the simplest of the simple—the cell-plants. Forms! outlines of cell-plants! Would not a single species content the naturalist? The ever-varying Hand that is traced in all around has touched these lowly objects with charms and wonders in the most exquisite modifications of form and the most delicate sculpture. The invisible is not the less beautiful that it is unseen; the physician owes much to these little things—why not the artist? Are there no laws of symmetry in natural objects, as there are of mechanics and of force? no sympathetic principles of harmony of colour with form, as of structure with locomotion or fixity? Even in these humble plants there are traces of that divine delicacy which may be observed and appreciated—an expression of that one word which cannot be spoken.

For the present attention is confined to those forms of algæ which exhibit the second stage in the development of vegetation—the linking of these cells, or cell-plants, together, which is naturally effected by their self-division and growth, without actual separation of the parts. And here the transitions exhibit those almost insensible gradations which have led some powerful minds to view the highest structures, and even intellectual man, as the consummation only of previous states and changes. But whatever ideas may be entertained of the manner by which the creative energy has worked, the results and the power, the ends and the means, are alike astounding, whether the monad or the cell were elaborated into the animal or the plant, or both were produced by a thought to fulfil their purposes in the economy of life. The globular membranous sacs or cells divide in a linear direction, and a string of the tiniest beads results. In the cylindrical cell—for the forms of the cells are in themselves various, both naturally as well as by the exercise of mutual pressure and other influences—a transverse partition is formed; the two ends are produced; in each of these again the same process is repeated, and a thread-like species is formed. Other globules adhere side by side, developing the membranous expansions of cellular tissue, in which we recognise the first appearance of the leaf. In the clinging together of the cylindrical fibres we perceive likewise the first rudiments of the branch and stem: in such cases, when the elongated cells of the fibres are of an unequal length, a continuous stem or cord is produced, varied only as it is enlarged or swollen by the methodical aggregation of greater numbers, or tapering by the prolongation of the central threads beyond the rest, or by the less robust condition of the young cells.

If the cell-cylinders are of equal length, nodes and internodes, like the joints of a reed, are produced; and by the bifurcation of the cells of the extremities branching fronds and ramuli result. Thus by this cell-splitting are formed the delicate branching forms of the rhodosperms (red sea-weeds), the paper-like membranous expansions of the ulvaceæ, the jagged fronds of the fuci, and the stout trunk of the gigantic lessonia. Thus the progress of the general plan, from the conception within the ovule, is traced, species by species, and genus by genus, until we pass ashore with the zostera and a few other similar borderers, and ascend through the mosses, ferns, and grasses, to the flowering plants and trees, and reach the summit of the second organic kingdom, where mind alone seems wanting to complete the conditions of life. Indeed, were it not for the perfection of all things around us, we might regard the formation of beautiful flowers and massive trees as arising from an imperfection—namely, the incomplete separation of the primitive cells in their self-division—and that Nature had turned the hint to most admirable and wonderful account, that she had improved upon it, and not only joined firmly together the sides of the connected cells, but in many of the thread-like species had enclosed them, for their better protection from disjunction, in gelatinous or mucous cylindrical sheaths, which may be fancifully, if not really, regarded as the first symptoms of the cuticle or bark. Most of the filiform algals are fresh water, but many of them are marine; and among the tufts of confervæ in brackish pools, or the floating scum on the surface of polluted water, along the muddy sides of ditches, as well as coating damp rocks and spray-splashed cliffs, upon decaying heaps of sea-wrack, on floating planks drifting ashore