188 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
(4) That they protect against epiphytes. This is hardly true, for 
Chorda often bears luxuriant ectocarpoid vegetation. 
(5) Church describes them (but with some hesitation) as mucilage 
organs, and calls them ‘ mucilage hairs.’ 
(6) Though perhaps not a primary function, I feel certain that in 
muddy waters the hairs effectively prevent sand and silt from settling on 
the thallus. In collecting Dictyota on oyster-banks in the Menai Straits, 
I have often observed passing steamers sending waves that churned up 
the mud, which afterwards seemed to cover the Dictyota plants. A slight 
movement of the water shook off the dirt, which was then perceived to 
have been caught and suspended in the web of hairs. 
Let us return for a moment to Church’s Memoirs, and consider his 
reasons for regarding this group as being so important. ‘The Pheo- 
phycee,’ says he, ‘illustrate in a manner beyond all other types of the 
plant-kingdom the beginnings of plant anatomy and vegetable morphology.’ 
Now there is a widespread impression that Church regards the higher plants 
as having descended from the brown seaweeds. This is an error, for he 
says: ‘It is from types parallel and conformable with these that all the 
higher flora of the land has been at some time derived’; and further: 
‘The inexplicable fact remains that they ’ (the first land-plants) ‘ appear 
to have been a green, starch-forming series of parenchymatous organism, 
a type at the present time wholly unrepresented in normal sea-water.’ 
In spite of the positiveness of many of his pronouncements on evolutionary 
questions, it is not always easy to decide how far we can accept them at — 
their face value. Sometimes we wonder whether certain terms are used — 
metaphorically, and not literally ; and whether certain types are quoted 
because they are analogous rather than related. And yet statements like 
‘Land Flora has been undoubtedly produced from the highest plant 
organisms attained in the sea’ seem explicit enough. So also is the — 
following: ‘ The whole of the fundamental framework of the organisation — 
of the land plant, the anatomy of its tissues, the morphological differentia- _ 
tion of members . . . are the expression of response to the conditions of — 
marine environment.’ The difficulty here is that so many evolutionists 
hold that new forms do not originate from the culminating members of a — 
series, but from lower ones, because the latter are, presumably, more 
plastic. It is not for me to argue the question, but simply to present the 
problems involved. When we are told that ‘forms of plant life have 
passed on to the dominion of the land, becoming adapted in turn to the 
novel conditions of subaerial existence,’ are we to suppose that the species 
literally became ‘ adapted,’ or that they gave rise to new forms which 
succeeded better in the new environment ? I quote the following without 
comment :— 
‘The idea that all these factors, largely the commonplaces of the 
Land Flora, should have been evolved in the sea, to run to waste, and — 
that they required to be again invented under entirely different condi- — 
tions in the evolution of larger land plants from such depauperated — 
relics as a fresh-water Alga (Coleochete) or retrograde Bryophyte | 
(Riccia) shows so remarkable a lack of insight into the more fundamental 
principles on which life has been evolved, that the rise and per- 
sistence of such views may well remain a historical curiosity of the 
science,’ 
