THE SEA-WEED TRIBE. 289 



believe the concurrent testimony of several French 

 and German Botanists. No one has investigated the 

 subject with more unwearied assiduity than Mons. 

 Gaillon, fi'om whose " Observations sur les limites 

 qui separent le regno Vegetal du regno Animal," I 

 shall translate some details that 1 think cannot fail to 

 amuse and surprise you. 



On the rocks that are found at low-water mark on 

 the coasts of Normandy and Picardy, there grows a 

 production called by Botanists Conferva comoides ; it 

 consists of fine brownish-yellow threads, collected in 

 the form of a hair-pencil, half an inch or an inch in 

 length, and at low water spreads over the surface of 

 the little round calcareous stones, to which it gives 

 something of the appearance of the head of a new- 

 born child. These threads are loosely branched, and 

 are finer than the most delicate hair ; the plant owes 

 its apparent solidity to the clustering and entangle- 

 ment of many such threads. Viewed under a mi- 

 croscope that magnifies 800 diameters, the threads 

 seem to be rounded, slightly compressed, and about 

 as large as fine packthread. They are of a mucous 

 nature, and contain immersed within their substance 

 a number of small yellowish bodies, which look at 

 first like dots, afterwards become oval, and end in 

 acquiring something the shape of a radish, having the 

 ends transparent, and the centre marked by a patch 

 of yellowish matter. If they are at that time sepa- 

 rated from the mucous matter in which they are 

 pressed and packed like herrings in a barrel, you may 

 see them moving, expanding, contracting, advancing 



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