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sea-coasts of our island home. Reverting to his former observations, 

 the author thus introduces the subject: — 



" What does experience say regarding the transrautative conversion 

 of a marine into a terrestrial vegetation,' — that experience on which 

 the sceptic founds so much ? As I walked along the green edge of 

 the Lake of Stennis, selvaged by the line of detached weeds with 

 which a recent gale had strewed its shores, and marked that for the 

 first few miles the accumulation consisted of marine Algae, here and 

 there mixed with tufts of stunted reeds or rashes, and that as 1 re- 

 ceded from the sea it was the Algae that became stunted and dwarfish, 

 and that the reeds, aquatic grasses, and rushes, grown greatly more 

 bulky in the mass, were also more fully developed individually, till at 

 length the marine vegetation altogether disappeared, and the vegetable 

 debris of the shore became purely lacustrine, — I asked myself whether 

 here, if anywhere, a transition flora between lake and sea ought not to 

 be found ? For many thousand years ere the tall gray obelisks of Sten- 

 nis, whose forms I saw this morning reflected in the water, had been torn 

 from the quarry, or laid down in mystic circle on their flat promon- 

 tories, had this lake admitted the waters of the sea, and been salt in 

 its lower reaches and fresh in its higher. And during this protracted 

 period had its quiet, well-sheltered bottom been exposed to no dis- 

 turbing influences through which the delicate process of transmuta- 

 tion could have been marred or arrested. Here, then, if in any cir- 

 cumstances, ought we to have had, in the broad permanently brackish 

 reaches, at least indications of a vegetation intermediate in its nature 

 between the monocotyledons of the lake and the Algae of the sea ; 

 and yet not a vestige of such an intermediate vegetation could I find 

 among the up-piled debris of the mixed floras, marine and lacustrine. 

 The lake possesses no such intermediate vegetation. As the water 

 freshens in its middle reaches, the Algae become dwarfish and ill-de- 

 veloped ; one species after another ceases to appear, as the habitat 

 becomes wholly unfavourable to it; until at length we find, instead 

 of the brown, rootless, flowerless fucoids and Confervae of the ocean, 

 the green, rooted, flower-bearing flags, rushes, and aquatic grasses of 

 the fresh water. Many thousands of years have failed to originate a 

 single intermediate plant. And such, tested by a singularly extensive 

 experience, is the general evidence. 



" There is scarcely a chain-length of the shores of Britain and Ire- 

 land that has not been a hundred and a hundred times explored by 

 the botanist, — keen to collect and prompt to register every rarity of 

 the vegetable kingdom ; but has he ever yet succeeded in transfer- 



