ALG^ OF NORTHWESTERN AMERICA. 



INTRODUCTION. 



No account of any completeness, or of pretension towards com- 

 pleteness, of the alggeof the northwestern coast of North America 

 has ever been published. Various accounts have been written 

 and odd references have been made in general and special works, 

 but nothing- which has Ijrought together all the available mater- 

 ials. We have l^een at work for some time trjdng to obtain 

 such a knowledge as to warrant the attempt, and in the following 

 pages we shall try to bring together all that is known to us, 

 either from specimens or from the literature, of the alg* of the 

 region known as the Northwest Coast. Unfortunately, the spec- 

 imens from which the earlier accounts are drawn, are all pre- 

 served, as many as still survive, in various European herbaria 

 and are, as yet, inaccessible to us. We have tried, however, to 

 make full use of such study as has been made of these in the 

 later days and published or communicated to us. While we have 

 tried to discuss, or at least to mention, every alga credited to 

 our territory, we have laid the greatest stress upon the results of 

 our own studies in the field and upon specimens communicated 

 to us, or otherwise accessible. This account, then, represents 

 largely our own experience in attempting to obtain a knowledge 

 of this algal flora. 



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GEOGRAPHY. 



The limits set for this account, from the geographical 

 point of view, range from Cape Flattery at the northwest- 

 ern corner of the State of Washington, northward along the 

 coast to the region of Kotzebue Sound on the Arctic coast of 

 Alaska. This general region is chosen for several reasons of 

 algal distribution. The study of the algae of the entire western 

 coast of North America has made it fairly plain that there are 

 four, or possibly five regions of algal growth ou the western 



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