"WEIGHING MOOEINGS 37 



blocks by ground-swell, which changes the sea-bottom iiTespective of 

 the attached vegetation : they are of special interest, not so much as 

 affording evidence of the effect of wave-action in changing the 

 bottom and carrying stones to the beach, as indicating the converse 

 action of also carrying stones with attached plants out to deeper 

 water, where it seems unlikely that their zoospores would ever ger- 

 minate. 



Thus Hooker at the Crozet Islands {Flora Antarctica, 1847, 

 p. 464) describes a large Macrocystis as rising obliquely at 45° from 

 40 fathoms, and extending several times the length of the ship, 

 definitely suggesting that this must have been a plant which had 

 weighed its moorings. It is clear that the effective pull of a Macro- 

 cystis with a hundred yards of fronds, each buoyed by a pneumato- 

 cyst, must be enormous ; but in this case the strain is met by a 

 flexible cable, and the general occurrence of " free-floatina^ " Macro- 

 cystis and " islands " indicates that the stem is usually the first to 

 give way. It should be possible to measure the breaking-strain of 

 the Macrocystis cable, though this does not appear to have been 

 done ; but it may be pointed out that even Desmarestia aciileata in 

 British Seas, as the finest representative (except D. ligidata) of the 

 *' filamentous soma," may present a breaking-strain of 12 lbs., imply- 

 ing that it would in the water lift a stone of 20 lbs. Observations on 

 D. aculeata at 90 fathoms in the Skagerack (Areschoug), or for 

 D. viridis at 150 fathoms at Spitzbergen (Kjellman, 1883), or for 

 similar algae in the Arctic (Dickie, in Journ. Bot. 1869, p. 148) are 

 clearly referable to " loose-lying " drift, maintained in the last cases 

 in a condition of " cold-storage " ; the deepest apparently satisfactory 

 record for a sea-weed of any size is still that of Laminaria Rodriguezii 

 off Minorca in 75 fathoms (125-150 metres, Bornet in Bull. Soc. 

 Bot. 1888, p. 361), the plant showing rhizome-runners and many 

 young growths. But all such records of plants in deep water, where 

 observations are confined to dredging stones from the sea-bottom are 

 thus open to the further error of weighed moorings, a factor that it 

 seems difficult to eliminate. 



EPIPACTIS VIEIDIFLORA Reich. 



By Colonel M. J. Godfeet, F.L.S. 



On July 29th, 1918, I w^as so fortunate as to discover, a few miles 

 from Guildford, a woodland form of E. viridijiora Rchb., which is 

 nearer to the continental descriptions of this plant than the forms 

 dnnensis, so ably described by Wheldon and Travis (Journ. Bot. 

 1913, p. 344) and vectensis by the Rev. T. Stephenson (Journ. Bot. 

 1918, p. 1). The descriptions of the elder Reichenbach (Fl. Germ. 

 Excurs. p. 134), of his son (Rchb. Icon. p. 142), and of Barla (Icon. 

 Orch. p. 11) agree very well with our plant, only differing in unim- 

 portant minor details. Reichenbach fil., while correctly citing 

 E. purpurata Sm. as a synonym of his E. Helhborine 5. violacea. 



