150 The Scottish Naturalist. 



by Lightfoot in the year 1777, in his Flora Scotica, on the authority 

 of a specimen communicated by Mr. Yalden from the Firth of Forth ; 

 and it is not a little remarkable that, though the plant has been found 

 on most parts of the English and Irish coasts since Lightfoot's time, 

 yet no more recent instance of its occurrence in Scotland has been 

 recorded, nor have I received it from any of my Scotch correspon- 

 dents." These plants have disappeared from their original localities 

 in comparatively recent times ; and I take it that the existence of the 

 " Peacock's-tail Fucus," on our coasts nearly three hundred years ago, 

 perhaps in much more recent times, is fairly well established. Car- 

 gill sent one other Alga to Bauhin, with description, this time a fresh- 

 water one, Alga bombycina, which agrees very well with our Conferva 

 bombycina, as far, at least, as a merely naked-eye description could 

 be expected to agree ; and this is the first recorded fresh-water Alga 

 from N.E. of Scotland of which I have been able to find anv notice. 

 We then pass over a long interval without any note from the N.E. 

 of Scotland. In 1777 Lightfoot's Flora Scotica appeared, but he only 

 adds one to the small list given by Cargill, viz., Laurencia pinnatifida, 

 Huds. But an earnest student had been hard at work there before 

 Lightfoot wrote ; indeed he died, at the age of forty-two, the year 

 before Lightfoot visited Scotland ; I refer to Dr. David Skene, who 

 was a correspondent of Linnaeus. He published nothing, though he 

 had made extensive preparations. Fortunately, most of his MSS. are 

 still in existence, and a small fragment of his Herbarium, compris- 

 ing Cryptogams only. His MSS. contain careful descriptions in Latin 

 of a large number of Phanerogams and Cryptogams, the localities 

 being usually given. The whole of his papers and the small remnant 

 of his plants came into the hands of the late Mr. Thomson of 

 Banchory, who had the whole carefully bound in volumes. In a note 

 at the beginning of the little vol. of specimens, Mr. Thomson states 

 that in several cases the labels were lost, in others they had got 

 mixed, in which case the names he had put down were not always to 

 be relied on. I have gone carefully over the Algae, numbering 43 

 specimens and embracing 25 species. They are all marine, except 

 one (Lemanea Jluviatilis). In his MSS. he notes, and in most cases 

 describes, 40, of which four are freshwater species, viz., the Lemanea, 

 a species of Nostoc, CEdogonium ccqnllare and Chara vulgaris, which 

 is scarcely a true Alga. Another long barren period follows, broken 

 slightly by the publication of a small list of Marine Algae, at Aberdeen, 

 in 1 814, by James Arbuthnot, jun., of Peterhead. From 1840, on- 

 wards, the study of Marine Algae, always an attractive subject, went on 

 apace ; and the results appeared in the publications of Mr. William 



