HISTORICAL REVIEW OF THE FLOEIDE^ 301 



country. The facility with which really astonishing pictures, with a 

 beauty of lijie and colouring, beyond ordinary dmughtmanship, were 

 to be produced, in an age when mechanical productions of artistic 

 value were so defective, led to the establishing of the cult of the sea- 

 weed album, and the formation of such a volume came to be regarded 

 as a ix)lite accomplishment eminently suitable for ladies of taste 

 and leisure. Many of these books survive to the present day, when 

 sea-weed mounting is almost a lost art, G. Brebner (tl905) being 

 one of the last exponents ; and it is still interesting to appreciate the 

 skilled manipulation of a fine specimen. It is curious to note how 

 the British Floridese lend themselves to such pictorial display, being 

 usually of a most convenient size; the larger Brown Algse were 

 allowed to complete the collection, rather in the form of 'juvenile 

 phases ' ; i. e. Laminarians less than a foot in length. 



Kuetzing (1843) in his Fhycologia Generalis alone exhibits a 

 more extended outlook of more modern botany, by the incorporation 

 of many detailed anatomical and physiological considerations, to- 

 gether with a large number of drawings made from careful sections, 

 some of which have done duty in text-books to the present dav. 

 Similar work for the world at large, as continued to the present time, 

 has extended the list to over 3000 species, which are found enume- 

 rated by De Toni i (1897-1905), of which about 300 are listed for 

 the British Coast by Batters (1902) -, 



Beyond what may be termed the book-keeping of the subject, the 

 great advances that have been made in our knowledge of the life- 

 history of these plants, are due to the work of relatively few 

 observers ; certain papers stand out 2)rominently as indicating epochs 

 in the progress of the science, as again expressive of new mental 

 attitudes and view-points in dealing with the plants, these being 

 more or less reflected into the subject from the general advance 

 in other fields of botanical research. 



I. Of these epochs the first is that indicated by the observations 

 of BoRNET and Thuret ^ on the French coast of the Channel and at 

 Biarritz, in connection with the question, more particularly, of sexual 

 reproduction, and following the lines of similar work on the Brown 

 Seaweeds : the significance of sexuality, and the nature of the repro- 

 ductive organs, being established for about a dozen genera, including 

 such forms as Nemalion, Helmintliora, Callithamnion cori/mhosiim, 

 Lejolisia, Dudresnaya. Much of the work sj)read over twenty years 

 was collected in the classical volume of the htudes JPliycologigues, 

 with beautiful aquatint plates from drawings by Eiocreux, which as 

 faithful representations of the living plant-tissues, as actually seen 

 fresh under the microscope, without distortion or conventional repre- 

 sentation, have never been surj^assed. 



^ DeToni (Patavii, 1897-1905), Sijlloge AUjarum, vol. iv. Floridese^ pp. 1870. 



2 Batters (1902), Supp, Journ. Bot. 



3 Bornet and Thuret (1867), Ann. Sci. Nat. p. 137, " Eecherches sur le fecon- 

 dation des Florideea " ; l^otes Algologiques (1876-1880); Etudes PJxycologiques 

 (1878), 



