130 
BASES OP SEAWEED. 
latitudes is from sixteen to twenty degrees, and the north 
winds, which sometimes rage there very tempestuously, drive 
floating isles of seaweed into the low latitudes as far as 
the parallels of twenty-four and even twenty degrees. 
Vessels returning to Europe, either from Monte Video or 
the Cape of Good Hope, cross these banks of Mums, which 
the Spanish pilots consider as at an equal distance from 
the Antilles and Canaries; and they serve the less in- 
structed mariner to rectify his longitude. The second bank 
of Fucus is but little known; it occupies a much smaller 
space, in the twenty-second and twenty-sixth degrees of lati- 
tude, eighty leagues west of the meridian of the Bahama 
Islands. It is found on the passage from the Caiques to the 
Bermudas. 
Though a species of seaweed* has been seen with stems 
eight hundred feet long, the growth of these marine crypto- 
gamia being extremely rapid, it is nevertheless certain, that 
in the latitudes we have just described, the Euei, far from 
being fixed to the bottom, float in separate masses on the 
surface of the water. In this state, the vegetation can 
scarcely last longer than it would in the branch of a tree 
tom from its trunk ; and in order to explain how moving 
masses are found for ages in the same position, we must 
admit that they owe their origin to submarine rocks, which, 
lying at forty' or sixty fathoms’ depth, continually supply 
what has been carried away by the equinoctial currents. 
This current bears the tropic grape into the high latitudes, 
toward the coasts of Norway and Erance ; and it is not the 
Gulf-stream, as some mariners think, which accumulates the 
Eucus to the south of the Azores. 
The causes that unroot these weeds at depths where it 
is generally thought the sea is but slightly agitated, are not 
sufficiently known. Ve learn only, from the observations 
Spaniards call mar de zargasso. I have shown, in another place (“Views 
of Nature,” Bohn’s edition, p. 46), that the passage of Aristotle, De 
Mirabil. (ed. Duval, p. 1157), can scarcely be applied to the coasts of 
Africa, like an analogous passage of the Periplus of Scylax. Supposing 
that this sea, full of weeds, which impeded the course of the Phoenician 
vessels, was the mar de siargasso, we need not admit that the ancients 
navigated the Atlantic beyond thirty degrees of west longitude from the 
meridian of Paris. 
* The baudreux of the Falkland Islands ; Fucus gigantcus, Fors'jsrj 
Laminaria pyrifera Lamour. 
