396 THE INHABITANTS OF THE SEA. 
of the plant at about two hundred feet; the pear-shaped air 
vessels at the basis of the leaves were often six or seven inches 
Jong, and the leaves themselves measured seven or eight feet. 
On these swimming fucus-islands lived a vast multitude of 
various animals; thousands upon thousands of barnacles and 
sertulariw, of crustaceans and annelides. 
“The admiration which the gigantic sea-weeds of Tierra del 
Fuego excited in our minds equalled that which had been raised 
by the exuberant vegetation of the virgin forests of Brazil. 
‘One single plant of the Macrocystis pyrifera would suffice, 
like one of the mammoth-trees of those luxuriant woods, to 
cover a large space of land with its leaf-like substance. The 
quantity of small alge, of sertularias, cellarias, and other 
minute animals dwelling on these swimming islands, surpasses 
in variety the multitude of parasitical plants bedecking the 
trees in a tropical forest. It seems as if, in these desolate and 
dreary regions, the generative powers of the planet were solely 
confined to the gigantic growth of submarine vegetation.” 
On the rocky coasts of the Falkland Islands are found no less 
astonishing masses of enormous sea-weeds, chiefly belonging 
to the genera Macrocystis, Lessonia, and Durvillea. Rent from 
the rocks to which they were attached, and cast ashore, they 
are rolled by the heavy surf into prodigious vegetable cables, 
much thicker than a man’s body and several hundred feet long. 
Many of the rarest and most beautiful algze may be here dis- 
covered, which have either been wrenched from inaccessible rocks 
far out at sea, along with the larger species, or have attached 
themselves parasitically to their stems and fronds. Many of 
them remind the botanist, by some similarity of form, of the 
sea-weeds of his distant home, while others tell him at once that 
he is far away in another hemisphere. The gigantic lessonias 
particularly abound about these islands. Their growth resembles 
that of a tree. The stem attains a height of from eight to ten 
feet, the thickness of a man’s thigh, and terminates in a crown 
of leaves two or three feet long, and drooping like the branches 
of a weeping-willow. They form large submerged forests, and, 
like the thickets of the macrocystis, afford a refuge and a 
dwelling to countless sea animals. 
A similar abundance of colossal algze is found in the Northern 
Pacific, about the Kurile and Aleutic Islands, and along the 
