CoLGAN — Tropical Drifl Seeds on Jrish Atlantic Coasts. 41 



waifs, though not always by the same currents and drift as waft them to the 

 shores of Europe. Seeds of Guilandina liave been stranded on St. Helena, 

 on tlie Bermudas, on the Azores, and even on the shores of the remote and 

 inhospitable Tristan d'Acunha.^ 



Again, the drift of our Irish beaches is not confined to these tropical 

 seeds ; for the same beaches that yield them yield also from time to time such 

 pelagic organisms as Salpa, Velella, lanthina, and Physalia, the Portuguese 

 Man-of-War. Quite frequently, after spells of westerly winds, the Blue Ocean 

 Snail, lanthina, and the "Velella are wafted to our western shores from Kerry 

 to Donegal. I myself have watched a fleet of Velella {V. spircms) sail in 

 with the tide on the shores of Clare Island in July, 1909. Miss Warren has 

 found both Velella and Physalia stranded on the beach of Bartra Island, 

 Killala Bay; and Miss Delap tells me that she has taken several living 

 Physalias at Valentia Harbour towards the end of October, 1916. Here, too, 

 she found cast up on the shore many floats of the Gulf Weed, Sanjassum 

 bacciferuvi, encrusted with a Polyzoon, no doubt the white Membranipora 

 witli which Moseley during the Challenger voyage found these floats so 

 conspicuously overgrown in the Sargasso Sea.'^ A recent Danish writer on 

 the Gulf Weed, F. Borgesen, tells us that he has had this MembVanipora 

 identified as M. txiherculata Buslv from specimens encrusting Sargassum floats 

 which he himself gathered in the Sargasso Sea. The very same species, he 

 adds, is found investing the floats of Linne's original type specimen of the 

 Gulf Weed in the possession of the Liunean Society.^ Now none of these 

 oceanic waifs, all of them inhabitants of warmer seas, are objects of trade ; 

 they are all most certainly wafted to our Atlantic beaches by natural agencies, 

 and, applying the maxim noscitur a sociis, the character of the seed-drift 

 may be known by the company it keeps. The stranding of the seeds, of the 

 pelagic animals, and of the Gulf Weed floats makes but a single phenomenon, 

 and is the effect of one and tlie same agency or chain of agencies. 



As for the objections that no one has ever seen a drift seed crossing the 

 Atlantic en route from the West Indies to the shores of Europe, and that 

 the Gulf Stream as a current cannot be recognized farther eastward than 



' H. N. Moseley : " Notes of a Naturalist on the Voyage of the Challenger." 1892, 

 p. 15. 



- "Numbers of the detaclied air vessels of tlie weed arc to be seen floating al)Out 

 amongst the living weed-beds coated entirely with the white Membranipora, and tliey 

 look at first like small globular pelagic animals." H. N. Mosely : " Notes of a Naturalist 

 on the Voyage of the Challenger." 1892, p. 15. 



^ "The species of Sargassum found along the coast of the Danish West Indies, with 

 Remarks upon the Floating Forms of the Sargasso Sea." Kjobouhavn, 1914. I am 

 indebted to Mr. R. Lloyd Praegor for a reference to this interesting paper. 



