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the fresh-water dulse of the Moray Frith, — creeping upwards from the 

 lower limits of production, till just where the common gray Balanus 

 ceases to grow. And there, short and thick, and of a bleached yel- 

 low hue, it ceases also ; but one of the commoner marine Confervae, — 

 the Conferva arcta, blent with a dwarfed Enteromorpha, — commencing 

 a very little below where the dulse ends, and taking its place, clothes 

 over the runnels with its covering of green for several feet higher : in 

 some cases, where it is frequently washed by the upward dash of the 

 waves, it rises above even the flood-line ; and in some crevice of the 

 rock beside it, often as low as its upper edge, we may detect stunted 

 tufts of the sea-pink or of the scurvy-grass. But while there is thus 

 a vegetation intermediate in place between the land and the sea, we 

 find, as if it had been selected purposely to confound the transmutation 

 theory, that it is in no degree intermediate in character. For, while 

 it is chiefly marine weeds of the lower division of the Confervae that 

 creep upwards from the sea to meet the vegetation of the land, it is 

 chiefly terrestrial plants of the higher division of the dicotyledons 

 that creep downwards from the land to meet the vegetation of the sea. 

 The salt- worts, the glass-worts, the Arenaria, the thrift, and the scurvy- 

 grass, are all dicotyledonous plants. Nature draws a deeply-marked 

 line of division where the requirements of the transmutative hypothe- 

 sis would demand the nicely graduated softness of a shaded one ; 

 and, addressing the strongly marked floras on either hand, even more 

 sternly than the waves themselves, demands that to a certain definite 

 bourne should they come, and no farther." — p. 240. 



Turning now to the chapter upon the " Lamarckian Hypothesis of 

 the Origin of Plants" and its consequences, we find the discovery of 

 a new animal organism in the lowest member of a geological group, 

 and the flora of Stennis and its shores, thus applied : — 



" I have said that the curiously-mixed, semi-marine, semi-lacustrine 

 flora of the Lake of Stennis became associated in my mind, like the 

 ancient Asterolepis of Stromness, with the development hypothesis. 

 The fossil, as has been shown, represents not inadequately the geo- 

 logic evidence in the question, — the mixed vegetation of the lake may 

 be regarded as forming a portion of the phytological evidence. 



" ' All life,' says Oken, ' is from the sea. Where the sea organism, 

 by self-elevation, succeeds in attaining into form, there issues forth 

 from it a higher organism. Love arose out of the sea-foam. The 

 primary mucus (that in which electricity originates life) was, and is 

 still, generated in those very parts of the sea where the water is in 

 contact with earth and air, and thus upon the shores. The first crea- 



