vol.i] Setchell— Gardner. — Algce of Northwestern America. 171 



st rivin g and seemingly of much importance in the. determining 

 of the laws governing the distribution of these plants as well as 

 of the physiological significance which regulates the whole matter. 



HISTORY. 



The history of the collections of, and publications on, the 

 alga? of the northwestern coast, is inseparably linked, both his- 

 torically and geographically, with those of the Ochotsk Sea and 

 Kamtsehatka. These coasts and those of the Bering Sea form 

 the important portion of our Upper Boreal Region of algal dis- 

 tribution. The first collections were made by Steller on the 

 shores of Kamtsehatka between the years 1742 and 1745. The 

 alga? collected by this great naturalist were described by Samuel 

 Theophilus Gmelin in his Historia Fucorum, published at St. 

 Petersburg in 1768. This general work, the foundation of algo- 

 logieal literature, gives the first mention of a number of our 

 species. The first to collect alga? strictly within the limits of our 

 territory was Dr. Archibald Menzies, who visited the Northwest 

 Coast in a trading vessel somewhere between 1779 and 1786, and 

 again in 1792, 1793, and 1794, as a member of the Exploring 

 Expedition in command of Captain George Vancouver. His 

 collections were figured and described by Dawson Turner in his 

 monumental work, Fuel, published from 1808 to 1819, but a few 

 of them were named and imperfectly described by E. J. C. Esper 

 ( 1802 ) from fragments sent to him by Turner without a suspicion 

 that they were to be used in that way. Adelbert von Chamisso, 

 poet and botanist, collected niany alga?, as well as other plants, in 

 the expedition under Captain Otto von Kotzebue on his first voyage 

 in 1816 and 1817, and these were described chiefly by C. A. Agardh 

 in the years 1821 and 1822. In the years 1826 to 1829, various 

 portions of the coast of Northwestern America were visited by 

 the exploring expedition under the command of Captain Fred- 

 eric Liitke. In the ship Seniavin with Captain Liitke, were the 

 botanists Alexander Postels and Henry Mertens, the former of 

 whom made the series of magnificent drawings later published in 

 connection with Ruprecht in the Illustrationes Algarum, while 



