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Brachytrichia Quoyii (Ag.) Bornet & Flahault. 



This is the latest name for a alga, which has undergone quite 

 a number of vicissitudes, illustrating some rather curious results 

 of the rules of botanical nomenclature, as at present applied. 

 In the List of the Marine Algae of the U. S., published in 1876, 

 Prof Farlow mentions doubtfully as Rivtilaria nitida? a plant 

 which he collected at Falmouth, Mass. ; later in the same year it 

 was published as No. 45 of the Alg. Am. Bor. Exs., ti^ Honnactls 

 Farlowii Bornet, Dr. Bornet having found this plant to be not 

 the common R. nitida of Europe, but to belong to the same 

 genus as Honnactis Balani^ Thuret, a genus first separated in 



I ^ 



1875. Soon afterwards it was discovered by comparison with 

 the original specimens, that the Nostoc Quoyii of C. Agardh, 

 from the Marianne Islands in the Pacific, was the same plant, 

 and so in 1881 In Farlow's Manual of the Marine Algae of New 

 England, It appears as Hormactis Quoyiij Bornet. Now it has 

 been found that the original specimens of Brachytrichia rivn- 

 larioides^ species and genus founded by Zanardini in 1872 on a 

 plant from Borneo, are the same as our Falmouth plant; so that 

 in the Revision des Nostocacees Hcterocystees of Bornet and 

 Flahault, it appears under the name at the head of this para- 

 graph. Although Zanardini's description differs entirely from 

 the true structure of the plant, yet as the authentic specimens 

 agree, the species must bear his generic and Agardh's specific 

 name, they being respectively the first given. 



As regards the plant itself, its occurrence on our shore is a 

 curious phenomenon; It is widely distributed in the Pacific, hav- 

 ing been collected at the Marianne Islands, Borneo, Ceylon and 

 California; but its only known station in the Atlantic is at Fal- 

 mouth, Mass. Its occurrence on our shore is not mentioned by 

 anyone earlier than 1876, though it is a rather noticeable plant in 

 midsummer, the season when most collecting is done. As to its 

 range, I have found it abundant on the Buzzard's Bay shore at 

 Wood's Holl, and in Quisset and Hog Island harbors, a few miles 

 north. On the Vineyard Sound side of Wood's Holl I have 

 looked for it for several miles along the shore, without finding a 

 single growing plant, when at the time it was very abundant on 



