102 • OBSEUVATIONS ON BRITISH MARINE XLG1E, 



indefinitely augmented. But a regrettable difference arose between 

 Fitch and bis employers, which resulted in the withdrawal of the 

 former from his connection with the Kew serials. Into the merits 

 of the dispute we have neither wish nor occasion to enter ; letters 

 from Fitch now before us show that he considered himself seriously 

 aggrieved, and with some appearance of reason; and the botanical 

 and horticultural public were certainly losers by the event. 



From this time Fitch's health began to fail r and although his 

 work became less frequent, in 1880 a Government pension of £100 

 was awarded him. The remainder of his days were spent with 

 his family at Kew, one of whom, Mr. F. W. Fitch, carries on his 

 father's work as a lithographer, in which connection his nephew, 

 Mr. J. N. Fitch, is also well known. He died, after a long and 

 trying illness, on Jan. 14th, and was buried at Kew. His name 

 was commemorated in 1845 in Fitchia Hook, f., a handsome genus 

 of Composite. He became F.L.S. in 1857. 



The value of Fitch's work appears to us to consist in that skill 

 in " seizing the natural characters of plants" to which Sir Joseph 

 Hooker referred more than forty years ago. He had also a keen 

 sense of form, and the arrangement of the leaves in most of his 

 plates would be in itself a lesson to a young botanical artist : his 

 colour appears to us less satisfactory. He himself thought that his 

 gifts lay rather in the direction of landscape, in 'which few were 

 found to agree with him ; and to this, as well as to the production 

 of coloured sketches of a mildly humorous kind, he devoted some 

 time. The originals of the drawings of the Botanical Magazine are 

 in the Kew Herbarium. 



For the use of the accompanying portrait, which appeared in 



the Gardeners' Magazine, we are indebted to Messrs. W. H. Colling- 

 ridge & Son* 



OBSERVATIONS ON BRITISH MARINE ALGiE. 



By R. J. Hakvey Gibson, M,A., F.L.S. 



In the Annals of Botany dated November, 1891, Messrs. Holmes 

 and Batters add an appendix to their ■ Revised List of British 

 Marine Algae,' in which they give a list of desiderata which will be 



useful to those who, like myself, have opportunities of observing 

 seaweeds at different seasons of the year. The following notes, 





though disconnected, may be of interest to algologists as illustratin 

 points which have hitherto escaped notice, or have been insufficiently 

 attended to in the morphology and physiology of Marine Algie. 



I. — Antheridia of Polysiphonia elongella Harv. 



The antheridia of this fairly common, species have, according to 

 Holmes and Batters, not hitherto been seen. Material which I 

 collected in August of last year at Connel Ferry, near Oban, N.B., 

 I found to bear antheridia. These appear to be of the type charac- 

 teristic of the genus. They are elongated ovoid bodies arising 



