
SEA-WEEDS. a 
rising upwards from the bottom of the sea to the altitude 
of twenty feet or more, typifies those gigantic sea-weeds 
of the North-western coast, which, in the instance of the 
Nereocystis, has a stem three hundred feet long; or the still 
larger Macrocystis of the Southern Pacific, whose fronds, 
according to Bory St. Vincent, stretch to a length of fifteen 
hundred feet! Grander these than any forest tree on moun- 
tain or plain, in tropical and luxuriant terrestrial vegetation ! 
Turning from these, and often lying close by among the 
heaped waifs from the stormy ocean, the inquirer may see 
the curious Sea-colander (Agarum Turneri), with its ten- 
derer and thinner frond, pierced with numerous roundish 
holes, and growing, when undisturbed, at the depth of ten 
fathoms of water; in this single species exhibiting on our 
coast one of the many kinds peculiar to the Northern Atlantic 
and Pacific shores. To find its seeds one must select the 
old and battered specimens cast up in early winter, in the 
thickened portions -of which they form dark-colored patches. 
Quite distinct, but of the same order, the slender Whiplash 
or F; ishing-line fucus, the Chorda filum, lays entangled 
among the rejectamenta, a simple cylindricał tubular frond, 
transversely divided into separate cavities, the seeds em- 
bedded in the whole exterior surface ; and the Honeyware, 
Murlins or Badderlocks of the shores of Scotland and Ire- 
land, is the Alaria esculenta, the midrib of which is eaten by 
the poorer classes of those countries, but here unnoticed or 
disregarded, though not uncommon on our coasts. 
me rarer sea-weeds, comprised in the order DICTYOTA- 
“EX, may be looked for in the tide-pools, though usually of 
‘More southern habitat, such as the Dot-bearer ( Stilophora), 
the seeds being imbedded in little punctiform dots, which 
internally are made up of bead-like, clavate, branching fila- 
ments; the frond cylindrical, imperfectly tubular, branched; 
while Dictyosiphon has a bristly frond, very much branched, 
branches capillary, the seeds solitary, a pretty olive- 
Colored “weed ;” and, in allusion to these seed-dots, we are 

