Dr George Lawson on Lemania variegata of Agardh. 31 
“Species Algarum,” published in 1828, an alga said to have 
been found “in fluvits Americe borealis,” was described under 
the name of Lemania variegata. Agardh’s original descrip- 
tion of the plant appears, however, to have been published 
in the Stockholm Transactions in 1814, to which I have no 
means of access at the present time. The specimen upon 
which the species was founded had been given to Agardh 
by Olaf Swartz, his first master in Algology, who obtained 
it from the collector, the Rev. Dr Muhlenberg of Lancaster, 
in Pennsylvania. Not having been met with by subsequent 
observers, Lemania variegata has been looked upon as a 
long-lost plant. 
In a parcel of specimens of cryptogamic plants sent tome 
in August 1862, by MrJohn Macoun of Belleville, Canada 
West, a most zealous and successful explorer, I at once recog- 
nised a Lemania, remarkable for its extremely rigid, promi- 
nently moniliform, curved filaments, attenuated towards the 
base and apex, and regularly marked throughout by alternate 
bands, dark and white,—agreeing, in fact, very well with 
Agardh’s description of LZ. variegata. I doubt not that the 
Belleville plant is conspecific with that of Agardh, and it 
is probably the identical form described in the “ Species 
Algarum.” 
Lemania, Bory. 
Generic character.—Fronds bristle-like, rising in clusters 
from a common adherent base, cartilaginous or corneous, 
continuously tubular, more or less nodose (brown, dull-green, 
blackish or parti-coloured), the tube-membrane composed of 
two distinct closely adherent strata of cells, those of the 
outer stratum minute, irregularly polygonal, closely united 
pavement-wise in radiating groups, those of the inner 
stratum rounded and not conformable, much larger than 
the others. Spores (so called by authors) in seriated stalked 
_ tufts, inside the swollen joints of the tube, and arising either 
from a central axis (according to Dr W. J. Thomson), or 
from the inner peripheral layer of cells, or from both. 
This genus is named Lemania by Bory, in honour of M. 
Lemain of Paris, ‘‘ a modest naturalist not less learned in 
