among confervoid filaments, three or four large, roundish, olive-coloured 

 spores, which divide internally at maturity into four sporules. Colour, a 

 dark olive, occasionally pale yellowish. Substance coriaceous. 



This well-known plant, which, with some schooling, we have 

 contrived to bring within the narrow compass of our plate, is 

 very common on most of the rocky Atlantic coasts of Europe 

 and North America, but is not found in the Mediterranean. 



Authors are at variance as to its duration ; Turner and Car- 

 michael asserting that it is a perennial ; Greville and Mrs. Grif- 

 fiths that it is annual. Certain it is that the plant appears to 

 reach to its full growth within the year, and that vast multitudes 

 of fronds then decay ; while their receptacles are detached, and 

 drift ashore in tangled strata. Possibly some survive to a second 

 season, and throw out new receptacles ; for I am unwilling to 

 set aside the evidence of so close an observer as the late Captain 

 Carmichael, who declares that he has seen old fronds which had 

 shed their first receptacles, throw out others, which latter fre- 

 quently spring, according to the same authority, from some ex- 

 centric point of the disc. I have, I must add, repeatedly and in 

 vain sought for instances of this second growth, and am therefore 

 disposed to regard the species as being, under common circum- 

 stance, an annual, — granting that it may occasionally be biennial, 

 from the influence of local causes. 



The common name is Sea Thongs, of which the lengthy Greek 

 by which it is known to botanists is nearly a literal translation. 

 It is used in the manufacture of Kelp, in which salt it is said to 

 be rich, though inferior in this respect to some of the true Fuel. 



Fig. 1. Himanthalia LOiiEA, a small specimen: — the natural size. 2. Cross 

 section of the receptacle. 3. Enlarged view of a conceptacle : — in situ. 4. 

 A spore, containing four sporules, and surrounded by hyaline filaments. 



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