2 SEAWEEDS 



British Museum, there is the earliest authentic 

 evidence of the collecting of seaweeds, the beginning 

 of the study; and the foundation of its literature 

 was laid by later systematic writers, including 

 Linnaeus. It was only to be expected that many 

 marine animals, such as Zoophytes, which resemble 

 seaweeds frequently in outward form, should have 

 been indiscriminately classed with them by these 

 writers, and it was not until the present century, 

 when our knowledge of minute structure had 

 advanced, that a strict division became possible 

 between the stony coralline Algse and similarly 

 encrusted animals. Gmelin's Historia Fucorum 

 (1768) and Esper's Abbildungcn der Tange (179*7) 

 were the first noteworthy efforts to gather within 

 a book devoted to the study of AlgaB all that was 

 then known, and as the result of the stimulus so 

 imparted to research, the first years of the present 

 century witnessed greater activity and progress in 

 the accumulation of knowledge of the forms of sea- 

 weeds and their classification. Lamouroux pub- 

 lished his Dissertations sur plusieurs especes de Fucus 

 in the year " XIII "( = 1805) of the new era of the 

 French Revolution, and a few years later there 

 was begun the best of all the early books, Dawson 

 Turner's Fuci (1808-1819), which not only cleared 

 up many of the difficulties of preceding writers, but 

 presented a large body of new facts acquired from the 

 study of specimens brought home by Robert Brown 

 and other great botanists and travellers of that time. 

 Perhaps the last of those who may be called the 

 pioneers of Phycology was Lyngbye, whose Tentamen 



