126 Sea Weeds. 



limites qui separent le regne Vegetable du regne Animal " a* 

 translated the following amusing and surprising details. 



On the rocks that are found at low water mark on the coast 

 of Normandy and Picardy, there grows a production called b 

 botanists Conferva comoides ; it consists of fine brownish-yellow 

 threads, collected in the form of a hair-pencil, half an inch o 

 an inch in length, and at low water spreads over the surface 

 of the little round calcareous stones, to which it gives something 

 of the appearance of the head of a new-born child. These 

 threads are loosely branched, and are finer than the most deli. 

 cate hair ; the plant owes its apparent solidity to the clustering 

 and entanglement of many such threads. Viewed under a 

 microscope that magnifies 300 diameters, the threads seem to 

 be rounded, slightly compressed, and about as large as a fine 

 pack-thread. They are of a mucous nature, and contain im- 

 mersed within their substance a number of small yellowish 

 bodies, which look at first like dots, afterwards become oval 

 and end in something of the shape of a radish, leaving the ends 

 transparent, and the centre marked by a patch of yellowish mat- 

 ter. If they are at that time separated from the mucous matter 

 in which they are packed like herrings in a barrel, you may 

 see them moving, expanding, contracting, advancing gravely 

 and slowly, retreating in like manner, altering their direction, 

 and finally possessing a spontaneous, incessant, measured, vol- 

 untary motion. These little creatures, which at most are not 

 more than the thousandth of an inch long, when once they are 

 separated from the thread that contains them, fall down in 

 countless multitudes, in the form of a chocolate brown deposit 

 on the neighboring rocks. Once there, they distend and emit 

 a globule of colored particles, which are evidendy their fry. 

 Each particle gains motion and volume, and the little globular 

 mass, lengthening and branching, reproduces, by the develope- 

 ment of the germs, that are collected together, the long green 

 pencilled appearance, which has led botanists to consider this 

 as a plant. 



In another production, green ditch-Laver, (Ulva Bullata, or 

 minima, or Tetraspora lubrica,) still more astonishing circum- 

 stances have been observed by M. Gaillon and others. This 

 plant appears to the naked eye, a thin green membrane, within 



