340 SEA WEEDS. 



gence and of the Power, which have presided over the en- 

 tire construction of the material world. 



We have seen that the first remains of Animal life yet no- 

 ticed are marine, and as the existence of any kind of animals 

 implies the prior, or at least the contemporaneous existence 

 of Vegetables, to afford them sustenance, the presence of 

 sea weeds in strata coeval wuth these most ancient animals, 

 and their continuance onwards throughout all formations of 

 marine origin, is a matter of a friori probability, which has 

 been confirmed by the results of actual observation. M. 

 Adolphe Brongniart, in his admirable History of Fossil Vege- 

 tables,* has shown, that the existing submarine vegetation 

 seems to admit of three great divisions which characterize, to 

 a certain degree, the Plants of the frigid, temperate, and 

 torrid zones ; and that an analogous distribution of the fossil 

 submerged Algoe appears to have placed in the lowest and 

 most ancient formations, genera allied to those which now 

 grow in regions of the greatest heat, whilst the forms of ma- 

 rine vegetation that succeed each other in the Secondary 

 and Tertiary periods, seem to approximate nearer to those 

 of our present climate, as they are respectively enclosed in 

 strata of more recent formation.-]- 



• Histoire des Vegetaux Fosslles, 4to. Paris, 1828. 



f See Ad. Brongniart's Hist, de Veg. Foss. 1 Liv. p. 47. — Dr. Harlan 

 in the Journal of the Academy of Nat. Sc. of Philadelphia, 1831, and 

 Mr. R. C. Taylor in Loudon's Mag. Nat. Hist. Jan. 1834, have published 

 accounts of numerous deposites of fucoids, as occurring in repeated thin 

 layers among the Transition strata of N. America, and extending over a 

 long track on the E. flank of the Alleghany chain. The most abundant 

 of these is tlie Fucoides Alleghaniensis of Dr. Harlan. I\Ir. R. C. Taylor 

 has found extensive deposites of fossil Fuel in the Granwacke of central 

 Pennsylvania; in one place seven courses of Plants are laid bare in the 

 thickness of four feet, in anotlicr, one hundred courses within a thick- 

 ness of twenty feet. {Jameson's Journal, July, 1835, p. 185.) I have 

 also seen Fucoids in great abundance in the Grauwacke-slate of the 

 Maritime Alps, in many parts of the new road between Nice and Genoa_ 

 I once found small Fucoids dispersed abundantly through shale of the 

 Lias formation, from a well at Cheltenham. The Fucoides granulatus 



