i , Plant Suppl. Ml 1843. p. 17) is r]. ;u -lv that of a 



luin: onsecutive species into one, by taking the nam.- of 



tl „. | „1 joinii on to the synonymy and habitat (Bóne [Algiers]) of 



:u | aiu i that ('. cyathiformis Decaisne came from Guadeloupe, and that 



the plant which was collected at Bóne by Steinheu was l'. Desfontainii Decaisne. Naegeli 



: . p. 177) probably blundered by accepting Enducher's statement 

 without ch< l by direct reference to Decaïsne's paper. 



Another piece of erroneous synonymy which requires rectification concerns an old and 



imen, to which 1 »r. M. A. Howe first called our attention, and which we have 



itly had the pleasure of examining, namely the type of Fucus vitifolius Humboldt & 



Plant. Aequinoct. [808—17 tab. 6g \ non preserved in the Museum d'Histoire 



at Paris. Brought up from a depth of 32 fathoms at La Graciosa (or between the 



VUegranza and [sola Clara, as the text says) in the Canaries, in "prair. an 7" 



(Prairial i. e. May 20 fui and being of a fine green colour, it so delighted von 



coming as it did from a depth which he believed to be too great for the sun's 



rays to reach, that he sketched it on the spot. He regarded it as a very curious phenomenon 



in vegetable physiology and came to the surprising conclusion that it is not only under the 



influence of the sölar rays that "se dépose, dans Ie parenchyma, cette hydrure de carbone qui 



paroit être la cause principale de la couleur verte des végétaux". 



The plant is unmistakeably identical with our present species and with Flabellaria 



fontainü, the type of Lamouroux's new genus Flabellaria, published strangely enough on 



p 274 of the same paper (in Annal. Mus. dd list. Nat. Paris XX. (813) in which Lamouroux 



cit. p. 283) refers Fucus vitifolius to Caulerpa. Perhaps he had never seen the actual 



imen [he records that it was given to Willdenow by v. Humboldt], and was misled by the 



. which is inaccurate- in some respects. C. A. AGARDH (Spec. Alg. I. [823 p. 445) was 



sharp enough to see from the plate that the plant was a doubtful Caulerpa, owing to its lack. 



of a creeping surculus. Endlicher ((ien. Suppl. III. [843, p. 16), when dividing up Caulerpa 



into subgenera, placed Fucus vitifolius in a new subgenus Photophobe - a name evidently 



alluding to the supposed darkness of the oceanic depths from which the plant had been 



obtained by v. Humboldt. Trevisan also divided up Caulerpa, but into genera, in his Cauler- 



pearum Sciagraphia ('in Linnaea XXII. 1849, pp. 129 — 144): and he instituted Olafsenia (loc. 



cit. p. 130) for v. Humboldt's Fucus vitifolius, stating that the plant was not to be found in 



any public collection. Thus he, like Lamouroux and Endlicher, never saw the plant. Kützing 



| 9 p. 1.99) cites it as a Chauvinia without any query. We believe that its 



tity with the present species has never been publicly notified. Consequently when D'Ai bertis 



I the same species in the same locality (Crociera del Corsaro alle Isole alla Madera e 



some 80 years later, it was believed by Piccone to be the first record 



■ 



tribution of this species is confined to the Mediterranean, the Canaries and the 

 slands. 



