Sertularia. 
Z. HYDROIDA. 
183 
Hob . Near low-water mark on Fuci, particularly on the stalks of 
Laminaria digitata. Common on all parts of the British coast. 
Grows in tufts from 2 to 4 inches high. The shoots are slender 
and neat, filiform, flexuose or widely zig-zag, always erect, alternate- 
ly branched, the branches erect, and, like the first shoot, serrulated 
with the polype- cells which are exactly opposite, and less everted than 
is usual to the genus. The outer angle of the aperture of the cell is 
produced into an acute point, and there is a sharp tooth on each side, 
which is omitted in the otherwise admirable figure of Ellis, although 
it could not escape his lyncean eye. * The vesicles are irregularly 
scattered on the branches, large, smooth, egg-shaped, the top often 
covered with a sort of rounded operculum : they are produced abun- 
dantly in the winter season and in spring, when indeed, I think, the 
ovaries appear on the greater number of this order of corallines. It 
was from the great resemblance of these vesicular ovaries to the cap- 
sules of mosses, that the early botanists drew an additional argument 
in behalf of the vegetability of the corallines themselves and a Dar- 
winian might be, perhaps, forgiven were he even now to feign how 
the Nereides stole them from the mossy herbelets of Flora’s winter 
and vernal shews, to deck and gem the arbuscular garnitures of their 
own coral caves ! J 
The shoots are usually so little waved that Pallas’ term “ subflex- 
uosi” is very appropriate, but in the collection of Dr Coldstream there 
* “ Zoophytorum lynceus Ellisius,” Lin. Syst. 1071. 
f “ These vesicles appearing at a certain season of the year, according to the 
different species of corallines, and then falling off, like the blossoms or seeds of 
plants, has made some curious persons, who have not had an opportunity of see- 
ing the animals alive in the vesicles, conclude them to be the seed-vessels of 
plants ; and into this mistake I was led myself, in the account laid before the 
Royal Society in 1752. In which account I had taken some pains to point out 
the great similitude between the vesicles, and denticulated appearance of some 
of these corallines ; and the tooth-shaped leaves and seed-vessels of some spe- 
cies of land-mosses, particularly of the Hypnumand Bryum.” — Ellis, Corall. In- 
trod. ix. 
| “ Nymphs ! you adorn, in glossy volutes roll’d, 
“ The gaudy conch with azure, green, and gold. 
******* 
“ You chase the warrior shark, and cumbrous whale, 
“ And guard the mermaid in her briny vale ; 
“ Feed the live petals of her insect-flowers, 
“ Her shell-wrack gardens, and her sea-fan bowers ; 
“ With ores and gems adorn her coral cell, 
“ And drop a pearl in every gaping shell.” 
Botanic Garden, Canto iii. 
