cheese-plates, we have soup-tureens and vegetable-dishes, meat-plates and dessert-plates; and why might we not have articles appropriated to the service of fish, and decorated with sea-weeds? I have frequently seen, in drying these objects, their forms impressed through the thick blotting-paper, and forming very beautiful tracery in low relief on the opposite side. Such impressions have always suggested the idea of a similarly simple, chaste, and elegant ornamentation of the plainer and commoner wares. The impressions left by the Chondrus crispus, Dictyota dichotoma, and other flat and interlacing forms, are most admirable for such a process. Simple accidents may often lead to unexpected results; and Grecian legends even attribute the discovery of modelling in relief to the tracing upon the wall, by a potter’s daughter, of the shadow of her departing lover’s face, which her father modelled afterwards in clay.
Root of Laminaria.
Passing by the genera Arthrocladia, Sporochnus, and Carpomitra, which all, in a greater or lesser degree, offer pleasing running patterns for the painting of porcelain or earthenware, and of flat surfaces in general, we come to the noble family of the Laminariæ, so well and ordinarily known under the names of sea-girdles and tangle. The size and expanse of the fronds of the various species of Laminariæ exposed, in the bleak and unprotected situations in which they grow, to the full fury of the waves, are provided for in their leathery toughness, the rope-like stem, and the numerous attaching discs of their branching roots. The root of the sea-weed differs very materially from the root of a plant: through it no nutritious sustenance is conveyed to the algal; it draws nothing from the soil; it is furnished with no organs; it is merely an adhesive holdfast, similar in principle to the sucker by which street-boys lift bricks and stones; it sends down no ramifying fibres into crevices of the rocks, but merely adheres to the surface. How far their peculiar characters could be elegantly made use of for the handles of vases, covers, lids, and other objects and parts of articles which require to be lifted or raised, must remain to be developed by the practical designer and manufacturer.
The mussels and shell-fish which attach themselves to the firm rootlets of the tangle, or which spin together or nestle in the meandering fronds of the smaller kinds, often produce groupings worthy of much admiration, and which would form material aids in the elaboration of practical patterns.
As there is much difficulty in expressing in a greatly reduced drawing a long and narrow form like that of the common tangle, I have contented myself with giving a figure of one of the roots, to show how applicable they are for art-purposes.
The North American and Kamtschatkan species—the Laminaria longicrucis—has a frond as large as a table-cloth, and a stem of proportionate length. The English species attain very frequently to six or eight feet, although in their native habitats they may be gathered of every size, and in every stage of growth; and to reduce such giants to the scale of a few inches would give no idea of their grandeur or beauty.
Of those immensely long and slender sea-weeds, placed by algologists in a distinct genus, with the expressive name of Chorda, little use, I think, can be made in the way of design. The mere collector has to wind them assiduously into a coil in his herbarium; and in their native element the only purpose they seem to serve is to stop the passage of boats, or to drown unfortunate swimmers by entanglement about their legs; for, although often thirty or forty feet in length even on British shores, and not thicker at their base than a whipcord, they are extremely tough and tenacious.
Dictyota atomaria.