896 THE INHABITANTS OF THE SEA. 



of the plant at about two hundred feet; the pear-shaped air 

 vessels at the basis of the leaves were often six or seven inches 

 long, and the leaves themselves measured seven or eight feet. 

 On these swimming fuous-islands lived a vast multitude of 

 various animals ; thousands upon thousands of barnacles and 

 sertulariae, of crustaceans and annelides. 



" The admiration which the gigantic sea-weeds of Tierra del 

 Fuego excited in our minds equalled that which had been raised 

 by the exuberant vegetation of the virgin forests of Brazil. 

 One single plant of the Macrocystis pyrifera would suffice, 

 like one of the mammoth-trees of those luxuriant woods, to 

 cover a large space of land with its leaf-like substance. The 

 quantity of small algae, of sertularias, cellarias, and other 

 minute animals dwelling on these swimming islands, surpasses 

 in variety the multitude of parasitical plants bedecking the 

 trees in a tropical forest. It seems as if, in these desolate and 

 dreary regions, the generative powers of the planet were solely 

 confined to the gigantic growth of submarine vegetation." 



On the rocky coasts of the Falkland Islands are found no less- 

 astonishing masses of enormous sea-weeds, chiefly belonging 

 to the genera Macrocystis, Lessonia, and Durvillea. Eent from 

 the rocks to which they were attached, and cast ashore, they 

 are rolled by the heavy surf into prodigious vegetable cables, 

 much thicker than a man's body and several hundred feet long. 

 Many of the rarest and most beautiful algae may be here dis- 

 covered, which have either been wrenched from inaccessible rocks 

 far out at sea, along with the larger species, or have attached 

 themselves parasitically to their stems and fronds. Many of 

 them remind the botanist, by some similarity of form, of the 

 sea-weeds of his distant home, while others tell him at once that 

 he is far away in another hemisphere. The gigantic lessonias 

 particularly abound about these islands. Their growth resembles 

 that of a tree. The stem attains a height of from eight to ten 

 feet, the thickness of a man's thigh, and terminates in a crown 

 of leaves two or three feet long, and drooping like the branches 

 of a weeping-willow. They form large submerged forests, and, 

 like the thickets of the macrocystis, afford a refuge and a 

 dwelling to countless sea animals. 



A similar abundance of colossal algae is found in the Northern 

 Pacific, about the Kurile and Aleutic Islands, and along the 



