&AMNE BOTANY. 19 



ferum, are thrown occasionally on the shores of Britain. 

 Superficial observers might consider them as native species, 

 but such is not the case; they resemble in their casual 

 visits those stranger birds, which, driven at distant periods 

 by uncertain winds upon our coasts, have been incautiously 

 admitted into the British Fauna. 



Thus journeying from afar, and telling of old times, these 

 plants recall to mind the awe and wonder expressed by 

 early navigators, when meeting with such vast accumula- 

 tions as to resemble boundless floating meadows, green and 

 pleasant to the eye, yet bringing sad thoughts of far-off 

 scenes to those who anxiously and wearily voyaged through 

 unknown seas. 



Strange and almost fearful must those oceanic meadows have 

 appeared, in the midst of a tumbling and raging ocean, to 

 men who perhaps had scarcely ever ventured beyond sound- 

 ings. Even now, naturalists who are familiar with the 

 wonderful developments of vegetable life in forms peculiar 

 to the exotic regions, regard with astonishment those oases 

 of verdure which Humboldt has described : the one extend- 

 ing from the 25th to the 30th deg. of north latitude west- 

 ward of Fayal ; the other of the Bahamas. The locality of 

 such banks, however, cannot be long depended on, as the 

 plants of which they are composed float wherever they are 

 impelled by winds or cui rents ; vessels, therefore, often pass 

 through vast fields in the latitude already mentioned, whilst 

 others, steering shortly after in the same course, meet with 

 scarcely any. Somewhat capricious, also, in the form which 

 they assume, those ocean-fields at one time resemble vast 

 savannahs, bounded only by the horizon — green, yet lonely, 

 for neither bird nor insect relieves the unvaried verdure : at 

 another, they resemble vast ridges, from ten to twenty feet 

 broad, and seem to stretch across the sea. Such banks or 

 fields are composed exclusively of the F. baccata, that wan- 

 dering plant which has never yet been found except float- 

 ing on the water ; whereas the F, natans vulgare of Turner 



