XXIV.-ALGAE OF THE PRIBILOF ISLANDS. 



By William A. Setchell, Ph. D., 

 Professor of Botany in the University of California. 



A very considerable region, containing many characteristic species and distinctly 

 marked off from adjoining i-egions, is that extending from Yesso, and the Sea of 

 Okhotsk, around to the east, through the Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands, and the 

 various archipelagoes lying along the northwestern shore of North America to the 

 Straits of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound. Eemote and little known as this region 

 is, yet the algae have long been a matter of study, Gmelin, in his Historia Fucorum, 

 iu 1768, described a number of forms from Kamchatka and the adjoining districts. It 

 was not until 1851, however, that any detailed account of even the algae of the 

 Okhotsk Sea was published. In that year appeared the work of Euprecht (1851), 

 since which nothing has been written about the algae of this region. Euprecht, how- 

 ever, does not restrict his enumeration exclusively to the forms of the Okhotsk, but 

 mentions quite freely localities all over the world, and among them the island of 

 St. Paul of the Pribilof group. The various Eussian exi^editions brought back many 

 seaAveeds among their collections. These were studied by Postels and Euprecht at 

 St. Petersburg, and the results finally given to the world in a magnificent volume, 

 the Illustrationes Algarum, in the year 1840. This account deals almost entirely 

 with the ITorth American coast from Unalaska to Monterey. Euprecht also published 

 two other papers on algae from the North Pacific (1SI8 and 1852) — Merters letters, 

 published in 1829, give graphic descriptions of a number of the larger and more 

 curious species of northwestern America. The algae of the Straits of Juan de Fuca 

 have been enumerated by W. H. Harvey (1862), and, finally, the Bering Sea forms 

 have received revision and augmentation at the hands of Kjellman (1889). Of all 

 the literature of the algae of the entire region there remains to be mentioned only two 

 small papers by Okamura (1891a and 1891b), mentioning certain species from the 

 Kuril Islands and from Yesso, and a paper by Farlow (1886), crediting two species 

 to the island of St. Paul. These are all the works dealing with the species of this 

 immediate region as far as they are known to the writer. While they treat in a 

 general way of the species of the .region, they do not, with the exception of the 

 Okhotsk flora and the paper of Farlow noted above, mention the Pribilof Islands in 

 particular, Euprecht, however, as mentioned above, has given a number of species 

 as occurring at St. Paul, and the writer has attempted to bring together in this 

 account all these references, in order that a beginning may be made in the work of 

 exploiting the marine flora of these islands. 



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