eTe) THE HISTORY OF CREATION, 
forms belong to this group. Especially I may mention 
here the stately sugar-tangle (Laminaria), whose slimy, olive 
green thallus-body, resembling gigantic leaves of from 10 
to 15 feet in length, and from a half to one foot in breadth, 
are thrown up in great masses on the coasts of the North 
and Baltic seas. 
To this class belongs also the bladder-wrack (Fucus 
vesiculosus) common in our seas, whose fork-shaped, 
deeply-cut leaves are kept floating on the water by 
numerous air bladders (as is the case, too, with many 
other brown Algz). The freely floating Sargasso Alga 
(Sargasso bacciferum), which forms the meadows or forests 
of the Sargasso Sea, also belongs to this class. 
Although each individual of these large alga-trees is 
composed of many millions of cells, yet at the beginning 
of its existence it consists, like all higher plants, of a single 
cell—a simple egg. This egg—for example, in the case of 
our common bladder-wrack—is a naked, uncovered cell, and 
as such is so like the naked egg-cells of lower marine 
animals—for example, those of the Meduse—that they 
might easily be mistaken one for another (Fig. 19). 
Fic. 19.—The egg of the common bladder- 
wrack (Fucus vesiculosus), a simple naked 
cell, much enlarged. In the centre of the 
naked globule of protoplasm the bright kernel 
is visible. 
It was probably the Fucoideze, or 
Brown Algz, which during the pri- 
mordial period, to a great extent 
constituted the characteristic alea-forests of that immense 
space of time. Their petrified remains, especially those of 
