In the former chapter are figured some of those prevalent species which no one could fail to find in a walk along the shore: in this, which is devoted to the olive weeds or true fuci, the illustrations are drawn chiefly from among others of those common forms which are accessible to everybody, about which there are no considerations of rarity, pains, or price, and which indeed are always to be had for the trouble of picking them up.
These Melanosperms are characterized by naturalists as plants of an olive green or brown colour, and as being in their fructification either monœcious or diœcious, that is, having the distinctive organs on the same or on different plants. They are propagated by spores, either developed externally, or singly, or in groups in proper conceptacles, each spore being enveloped in a pellucid skin called a perispore, and being in some cases simple, and in others ultimately dividing into two, four, or eight sporules. Antheridia—a term admitted as indicative only, and by courtesy in the case of algæ, the actual propriety of the term being still contested—appear in some; in others are transparent cells filled with orange-coloured vivacious corpuscles, possessed of free motion by means of vibratile cilia. The whole group is marine. If any take objection to the word “plants,” the botanist will tell them that algæ have a double respiration, like their higher sisters of the land,—that by day they absorb carbonic-acid gas, and give out the life-supporting oxygen, and that in the silent hours of the night they reverse the process, and emit carbonic-acid gas.
To point out their relations and concordances with terrestrial vegetation is, however, a very easy task; but not so is it to draw the line between animality and vegetation. Some authors, indeed, and those not despicable ones, have gone so far as to assert that the germs of some sea-weeds, in their first condition, are actually endowed with life. Be this as it may, no line has yet been drawn which separates either distinctly or decisively the animal from the plant; and, as Dr. Lindley truly observes, “whatever errors of observation may have occurred, those very errors, to say nothing of the true ones, show the extreme difficulty, not to say impossibility, of pointing out the exact frontier of either kingdom.” We commence our present division—and shall follow the like course with the others—with its higher forms, and, proceeding in descending order, shall in each conclude with those humble rudimentary forms in which the rigid divisions of classification are obliterated, and the only differences which can be assigned are, at best, but little more than arbitrary.
To me how welcome and how dear are the olive algals of the rocky shores! Born within sound of the surging waves, for ever singing “their unrhymed lyric lays”—from infancy to manhood living on the margin of the briny deep—how fresh and dear to me these much-neglected things! “What pleasant visions haunt me” of childish hopes and fears; and as again I seem to
“Gaze upon the sea,
All the old romantic legends,
All my dreams come back to me.”
And in Fancy’s realms my drooping thoughts pass on to those homeless wanderers over the face of the earth, for whom never more the scenes of their first homes will wear a charm—who, torn from all familiar ties, and tossed and buffeted on the sea of life, may perish unregarded in some far-distant land. The surging crests of the great ocean’s waves oft cast, to moulder on our shores, the weeds and plants of other climes. We have figured one of these fragments, which, after its long and boisterous wanderings from the Azores to the eastern shores of the new world, across the wide Atlantic to our own boreal coasts of the old, has lost but little of its beauty. In the days of old adventure the matted cords of this charming species stopped the famous Spaniard’s ships; and still the long and narrow floating isles of Gulf-weeds—shunned by the sailor—are the resting-places of myriads of crabs, and other hosts of ocean’s progenies hide and nestle in its watery bowers.
But charming as the Sargassum bacciferum is in its gracefulness, and attractive as it may be in its historic associations, naturalists would not, of course, admit either itself or its congener, the Sargassum vulgare, as a truly British kind, but would properly regard them as stray waifs from tropical climes. The generic name is a Latinisation of the term sargazo, given to the Gulf-weeds by the companions of Columbus, and will for ever preserve the memory of its first discoverer; while the ancient specific additamentum of natans, or swimming, was highly characteristic of the habits of the species.
Next in the ranks, and foremost of the really British weeds, stands the common, but elegant, Halidrys siliquosa, already figured at page 110, distinguished from all other fuci by the compound structure of its air-vessels—a character peculiar to it, and to the beautiful Fucus osmundaceus, of the western shores of North America. In the last the structure is slightly different, the vesicles being constricted at the joints like strings of beads. The air-vessels of the Halidrys siliquosa are those pea-pod-like expansions of the frond, divided into chambers, which seem almost to take the place of leaves in the engraving (p. 110).
Sargassum bacciferum, or Gulf-weed.