324 NOTES ON THE BOTANY 
water, where there are no icebergs, no seas ean possibly, 
humanly speaking, harm them. 
On the 24th, in latitude, 50°, 30’, two patches of the Lami- 
naria were observed floating, but the state of the sea 
rendered it impossible to pick them up. The eyes of 
the voyagers were greeted on the night of the 27th with 
the sight of the stars, which had not appeared since the 
ships had left New Zealand, in November 1841. Such 
is the climate of the cheerless regions of the southern 
hemisphere! The Botanist writes, on the 24th of March, 
“I am just called on deck, for the captain has been sound- 
ing for temperatures at various depths, and has brought 
up a stock of the Laminaria, which I believe to be the 
same as one of the two species from Cape Horn. Like 
the Sargasso weed, this Laminaria grows and increases at 
sea. The Stem (the root is gone) is cylindrical, and 
about 6 inches long; lamina not bigger than one’s 
hand, divided into twelve lacinia, 6-14, and even 20 
feet in length, plane, varying in breadth from 2 inches 
to a foot, very coriaceous, composed of a cortex of dense 
and, when dry, horny tissue, and a single row of hori- 
zontal cells of very large size. Colour olive-yellow, 
olive-brown, or green, the older portions thick, wrinkled, 
and dark, the younger parts brighter yellow, and slender, 
more tender and flatter, none of the apices entire. The 
southern Laminarie, which, being among the giants of the ac- 
quatic vegetable kingdom, ought to be well known, appear 
almost entirely misunderstood. This plant, for instance, which 
I believe to be the Laminaria, or D’Urvillea, utilis, referred 
to the Laminarie both by Greville and Endlicher, certainly does 
not agree with the characters laid down by the former author, 
(vide p. 24 of his British Alge). A sketch, which I made of it 
at Cape Horn, shows the sporules to be contained in distinct 
receptacles, embedded in the cortical substance, and appear- 
ing, on a transverse section, like a string of beads immediately 
under the surface; they open by pores and emit a mass of 
