Part 8

It is not in the herbarium, not in drawings, not when dried and shrivelled, and black and contorted, that we can see the beauty of sea-weeds; such are no more than the bleared and withered mummies of Egyptian men to the fresh vigour of youth: it is while free and waving in the waters that we must search for the best elucidations of their habits and gracefulness. Years ago Ray wrote in his earnest and noble manner:--“Let us then consider the works of God, and observe the operations of his hands. Let us take notice of, and admire, his infinite wisdom and goodness in the formation of them: no creature in this sublunary world is capable of so doing besides man, and yet we are deficient herein: we content ourselves with the knowledge of the tongues, or a little skill in philology, or history perhaps, and antiquity, and neglect that which to me seems more material--I mean natural history, and the works of creation. I do not discommend or derogate from those other studies; I should betray mine own ignorance and weakness should I do so: I only wish that _this_ might be brought into fashion among us. I wish men would be so equal and civil as not to disparage, deride, and villify those studies which themselves skill not of, or are not conversant in; no knowledge can be more pleasant than this, none that doth so satisfie and feed the soul, in comparison whereto that of words and phrases seem to me insipid and jejune.” How he would have rejoiced at the popular movement introduced by Mr. Mitchell at the Zoological Gardens, and since so powerfully backed up by other colossal vivaria of the day; the aquaria at the Crystal Palace, Brighton, Ramsgate, and other places; and what results would he not have predicted when, in walking through the mammontainted streets of our great metropolis, he passed dozens of shops for the sale of aquaria, vivaria, glass jars, siphons, prawns, mussels, anemones, efts, and sticklebacks! All these and many more living things cannot be kept and nourished, watched and fed, without the spread of that knowledge which is known, and the acquirement of a vast deal that is new. Naturalists will no longer be able to write books on things they have never seen; and hasty jumpings to conclusions, and closet speculations, will be rarer as the chance of detection becomes the greater, and the spirit in which all true men of science do labour, and ever have done, is the more rightly appreciated. The Merry Monarch’s little spaniel has its collar of red morocco, with its silver plate, and the imprisoned songster of a warmer clime is confined in a pretty cage. The love of natural history is not the cherished taste of the poor--it is not bounded by the circumscribed limits of the middle ranks, who find in a glass jar of living objects from the pond or sea a refreshing pastime from the heavy cares of daily bread, and a cooling relief from toil, or the feverish anxieties of money-making; but the love of natural history lives no less in high places and delicate minds, whose susceptibilities have been heightened by every kind of culture, gaze with delight on the glittering armour of the scaly fish, and watch with interest the actions, motions, and habits of the thousand instructive objects to be collected at any time in a single tide. How charming to give a little elegance to the transparent homes to which we consign our new-made pets! We no longer confine ourselves to cheap glass and zinc fountains. White marble and bronze have brought our favourites into the boudoir and the drawing-room. Look at the festoons of fuci on the rugged rocks: have not worse things been chiselled and cast? and at that tall bundle of crisp _Laminaria Phyllitis_, as it stands erect in the transparent water. How charmingly a crystal vase would rest upon its slightly diverging crests, like the abacus on the leaves of a Corinthian pillar! how delicate the slight frillings of the margins of its translucent fronds!

Various other applications are at once suggested by the little group we have figured; such are mouldings, beadings, tracery, and cornices, and for the sculpture of mahogany and other dark woods; and in our progress through the more elaborate forms of sea-weeds we shall find very much to admire as elegant, and as applicable to manufactures and to the ornamentation of various objects--often of opposite purposes.

II.

As one coming in a strange land for the first time, on a junction of many roads, finds himself bewildered, and hesitating in his choice which to take, being ignorant which leads to the fairest places, and not knowing what beauties he may miss by selecting the one or the other, so in displaying the attractions of sea-weeds for artistic purposes--a field where so little has been attempted--it is not easy to decide, where so many courses appear to be open. It is not the difficulty of a beginning, for the start has been made; nor of the end, for a precipitate retreat has happened to more than one illustrious character; and if these pages could prove as entertaining as the immortal Sam’s valentine, even “a sudden pull up” might only make the reader “wish there was more.” But the difficulty is in adopting that order of narration which shall be most attractive in securing for the neglected sea-weeds their due meed of recognition and reward.

In the former chapter are figured some of those prevalent species which no one could fail to find in a walk along the shore: in this, which is devoted to the olive weeds or true fuci, the illustrations are drawn chiefly from among others of those common forms which are accessible to everybody, about which there are no considerations of rarity, pains, or price, and which indeed are always to be had for the trouble of picking them up.

These _Melanosperms_ are characterized by naturalists as plants of an olive green or brown colour, and as being in their fructification either monœcious or diœcious, that is, having the distinctive organs on the same or on different plants. They are propagated by spores, either developed externally, or singly, or in groups in proper conceptacles, each spore being enveloped in a pellucid skin called a perispore, and being in some cases simple, and in others ultimately dividing into two, four, or eight sporules. Antheridia--a term admitted as indicative only, and by courtesy in the case of algæ, the actual propriety of the term being still contested--appear in some; in others are transparent cells filled with orange-coloured vivacious corpuscles, possessed of free motion by means of vibratile cilia. The whole group is marine. If any take objection to the word “plants,” the botanist will tell them that algæ have a double respiration, like their higher sisters of the land,--that by day they absorb carbonic-acid gas, and give out the life-supporting oxygen, and that in the silent hours of the night they reverse the process, and emit carbonic-acid gas.

To point out their relations and concordances with terrestrial vegetation is, however, a very easy task; but not so is it to draw the line between animality and vegetation. Some authors, indeed, and those not despicable ones, have gone so far as to assert that the germs of some sea-weeds, in their first condition, are actually endowed with life. Be this as it may, no line has yet been drawn which separates either distinctly or decisively the animal from the plant; and, as Dr. Lindley truly observes, “whatever errors of observation may have occurred, those very errors, to say nothing of the true ones, show the extreme difficulty, not to say impossibility, of pointing out the exact frontier of either kingdom.” We commence our present division--and shall follow the like course with the others--with its higher forms, and, proceeding in descending order, shall in each conclude with those humble rudimentary forms in which the rigid divisions of classification are obliterated, and the only differences which can be assigned are, at best, but little more than arbitrary.

To me how welcome and how dear are the olive algals of the rocky shores! Born within sound of the surging waves, for ever singing “their unrhymed lyric lays”--from infancy to manhood living on the margin of the briny deep--how fresh and dear to me these much-neglected things! “What pleasant visions haunt me” of childish hopes and fears; and as again I seem to

“Gaze upon the sea, All the old romantic legends, All my dreams come back to me.”

And in Fancy’s realms my drooping thoughts pass on to those homeless wanderers over the face of the earth, for whom never more the scenes of their first homes will wear a charm--who, torn from all familiar ties, and tossed and buffeted on the sea of life, may perish unregarded in some far-distant land. The surging crests of the great ocean’s waves oft cast, to moulder on our shores, the weeds and plants of other climes. We have figured one of these fragments, which, after its long and boisterous wanderings from the Azores to the eastern shores of the new world, across the wide Atlantic to our own boreal coasts of the old, has lost but little of its beauty. In the days of old adventure the matted cords of this charming species stopped the famous Spaniard’s ships; and still the long and narrow floating isles of Gulf-weeds--shunned by the sailor--are the resting-places of myriads of crabs, and other hosts of ocean’s progenies hide and nestle in its watery bowers.

But charming as the _Sargassum bacciferum_ is in its gracefulness, and attractive as it may be in its historic associations, naturalists would not, of course, admit either itself or its congener, the _Sargassum vulgare_, as a truly British kind, but would properly regard them as stray waifs from tropical climes. The generic name is a Latinisation of the term sargazo, given to the Gulf-weeds by the companions of Columbus, and will for ever preserve the memory of its first discoverer; while the ancient specific additamentum of _natans_, or swimming, was highly characteristic of the habits of the species.

Next in the ranks, and foremost of the really British weeds, stands the common, but elegant, _Halidrys siliquosa_, already figured at page 110, distinguished from all other fuci by the compound structure of its air-vessels--a character peculiar to it, and to the beautiful _Fucus osmundaceus_, of the western shores of North America. In the last the structure is slightly different, the vesicles being constricted at the joints like strings of beads. The air-vessels of the _Halidrys siliquosa_ are those pea-pod-like expansions of the frond, divided into chambers, which seem almost to take the place of leaves in the engraving (p. 110).

Intermediate between Halidrys and the true fuci is placed the genus _Cystoceira_. One of the most elegant of this charming genus is the heath-like species, _Cystoceira ericoides_. On the shores of the south of England especially, and over a very considerable geographical range, extending even to the north of Africa, it may be gathered at almost any period of the summer or autumn. Under the water it glows with prismatic colours, and as each twig waves to and fro, the hues vary as the light glances on its fronds; and while some “seem covered with sky-blue flowers, others remain dark.” In the air it presents only a glossy yellow, and in the herbarium all its enchanting beauties of colour are gone, and unless very great pains and skill have been exercised in the manipulation, it will have shrunk in drying, and turned black.

In passing, it will be as well to gather specimens of the rather stiff and cylindrical _Pycnophycus tuberculatus_, standing alone as it does _sui generis_.

Of the true fuci, at page 108 is already figured the knotted one, of which Scotch boys make whistles (_Fucus nodosus_), and that with the saw-like edges (_Fucus serratus_), p. 109; but the ordinary bladder-bearing sort, the _Fucus vesiculosus_, and the more translucent and bladderless or smooth kind, the _Fucus ceranoides_, and indeed the whole genus, though common in the extreme, have high claims to the attention of designers, not alone in the elegance of their outlines and the disposition of their fronds, but as being the very types and models of sea-weeds.

The _Fucus vesiculosus_ was at one time, particularly in the Orkney Isles, regularly cropped for the manufacture of kelp, and it is also known to contain a valuable portion of the sweet principle called mannite. In the cold and inhospitable regions of the polar lands, where the thick snow has buried the scanty herbage of the fields, the rocks furnish in their meadows of fuci abundant fodder for the hungry kine, which regularly, at the retreat of the tide, come down to graze; and if these pages were not devoted to other arts than the culinary, one might not unentertainingly give a disquisition on edible sea-weeds, and on the various means by which they are made subservient to the luxuries or necessities of man.

The Icelanders, Greenlanders, the Chinese, and the East Indians have already made some progress in this department; and nearer home, the _Chondrus crispus_, “carrageen,” or Irish moss, figured at page 120, has long ago been placed on the table, in soup, jellies, and blanc-manges.

Or, if the natural history of the class were the object, one might with equal pleasure dwell on the marvellous exhibition of the strange animal-like motions of the troops of zoospores which issue from the thick yellow slime exuded from the ripe receptacles of the _Fucus serratus_--motions apparently so voluntary that it is difficult to consider them as concordant with mere vegetation.

I have already hinted at the capabilities of these weeds as suggestive models for the carver in wood. Now few modern structures are fitted up with more elegance than our first-class ships, and in them no one will contend there is not a great and appropriate field for the display of the ornamental or decorative capabilities of sea-weeds. Here they are at once appropriate and reminiscent of those shores the voyagers have left behind--speaking to them, whilst gliding over the sea, of those lands whence they had departed, and of those other lands which they are seeking. Around and beneath figure-heads, as scrolls upon the bows or stern, bordering the panels of the cabin, and modelled to suit the various machinery on deck, the designer might create a marine ornamentation as characteristic and as pleasing, and as elaborate, if he chose, as Corinthian skill developed from the tile-covered plant for the architecture of the land.

In bronze or in iron, indeed in all dark metal-work, the fuci could not fail to be elegant objects, and rich in their grouping and in the effects produced. In many of those objects, too, which the gilder prepares, the cockle-shells, or cockle-like scrolls and cups so prominently displayed might be as elegantly and more appropriately supported by well-devised groups of algæ than by lilies, fleurs-de-lys, or traceries of meaningless design.

One very pretty diminutive species of _Fucus_ (_F. canaliculatus_) grows on the very edge of the tide, and often where the waves wet the rocks only with their spray. The chief crop grows certainly above the level of half-tide, and these plants show a preference for droughty situations; not unfrequently in the hot days of the summer we find them quite crisp and dry, but on the return of the tide they again absorb the aqueous fluid, and recover life and flexibility. So sea-weeds which have long been shrivelled up in the house will recover in appearance all their freshness and verdancy on being merely immersed in a glass of salt or spring water; and the virtues of the former are now brought from the sea into our homes in the form of Tidman’s Crystals. I make this allusion because it is important that the artist, living perhaps in some inland town or city, should know that the natural models he may bring from the seaside on his holiday trip may be in reality, though not apparently, usefully retained for future studies. Many of the more leathery kinds will submit to several resuscitations of this nature, although, as might be expected, a deterioration and loss of colour, more or less, take place in each successive instance. The ordinary method of preserving sea-weeds for natural-history purposes is, as is familiarly known, to press them between folds of linen and blotting-paper on to stout drawing-paper, to which by their glutinous substance they firmly adhere, forming, under the skilfulness of the manipulator, the most exquisite natural pictures. In all these, however, the very act of compression, and the spreading out of the object on a flat surface, gives an unnatural aspect, very different from their free condition. It may be well, therefore, to state that in some few experiments I have made I have found that pure glycerine will preserve even the more pulpy and plump sorts--if I may use that expressive adjective--without even the slightest change for at least considerable periods. Some of my specimens have been kept in glycerine for more than eight months, and are as fresh in substance and in colour as when they were first collected. Choice samples seem thus capable of being indefinitely preserved in proper glass or earthen vessels for use at any time by the designer.

In a visit to the art-museums at South Kensington I observed two instances of the introduction of sea-weed: one in Mr. H. Weekes’s noble statue of a “Young Naturalist,” where, though sparingly made use of, they can but be regarded as successful innovations; the other in the collection of imitation Majolica ware, where a large vase has in relief some fronds of the _Fucus serratus_, which, from their unnaturally bright green and the want of strict attention to the natural model, are not so attractive as could have been desired. That sea-weeds, both painted or impressed upon china and earthenware, are capable of producing fine results, can scarcely be doubted; and although it cannot be written of me, as it was of an eminent statesman,--

“China’s the passion of his soul-- A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl, Can kindle wishes in his breast, Inflame with joy, or break his rest,”--

I shall not willingly give up the potter’s art as intractable to my purpose.

The genus _Desmarestia_, which follows the fuci in natural order, offers some neat patterns for the painting of pottery and china ware, especially in the long oval fronds of the _Desmarestia ligulata_, a microscopic section of which is given at page 103. Its branching fronds, so leaf-like in their development, and yet so unleaf-like in reality, tempted me to figure a single branch of one of these plants, as an example of its peculiar characters, which, in their pale olive-green and purple hues, could scarcely fail of showing to advantage on the white translucent ground of aluminous materials. We have plates of a particularly small size dedicated to the curdled produce of the dairy--in plain English, we have

cheese-plates, we have soup-tureens and vegetable-dishes, meat-plates and dessert-plates; and why might we not have articles appropriated to the service of fish, and decorated with sea-weeds? I have frequently seen, in drying these objects, their forms impressed through the thick blotting-paper, and forming very beautiful tracery in low relief on the opposite side. Such impressions have always suggested the idea of a similarly simple, chaste, and elegant ornamentation of the plainer and commoner wares. The impressions left by the _Chondrus crispus_, _Dictyota dichotoma_, and other flat and interlacing forms, are most admirable for such a process. Simple accidents may often lead to unexpected results; and Grecian legends even attribute the discovery of modelling in relief to the tracing upon the wall, by a potter’s daughter, of the shadow of her departing lover’s face, which her father modelled afterwards in clay.

Passing by the genera _Arthrocladia_, _Sporochnus_, and _Carpomitra_, which all, in a greater or lesser degree, offer pleasing running patterns for the painting of porcelain or earthenware, and of flat surfaces in general, we come to the noble family of the _Laminariæ_, so well and ordinarily known under the names of sea-girdles and tangle. The size and expanse of the fronds of the various species of _Laminariæ_ exposed, in the bleak and unprotected situations in which they grow, to the full fury of the waves, are provided for in their leathery toughness, the rope-like stem, and the numerous attaching discs of their branching roots. The root of the sea-weed differs very materially from the root of a plant: through it no nutritious sustenance is conveyed to the algal; it draws nothing from the soil; it is furnished with no organs; it is merely an adhesive holdfast, similar in principle to the sucker by which street-boys lift bricks and stones; it sends down no ramifying fibres into crevices of the rocks, but merely adheres to the surface. How far their peculiar characters could be elegantly made use of for the handles of vases, covers, lids, and other objects and parts of articles which require to be lifted or raised, must remain to be developed by the practical designer and manufacturer.

The mussels and shell-fish which attach themselves to the firm rootlets of the tangle, or which spin together or nestle in the meandering fronds of the smaller kinds, often produce groupings worthy of much admiration, and which would form material aids in the elaboration of practical patterns.

As there is much difficulty in expressing in a greatly reduced drawing a long and narrow form like that of the common tangle, I have contented myself with giving a figure of one of the roots, to show how applicable they are for art-purposes.

The North American and Kamtschatkan species--the _Laminaria longicrucis_--has a frond as large as a table-cloth, and a stem of proportionate length. The English species attain very frequently to six or eight feet, although in their native habitats they may be gathered of every size, and in every stage of growth; and to reduce such giants to the scale of a few inches would give no idea of their grandeur or beauty.

Of those immensely long and slender sea-weeds, placed by algologists in a distinct genus, with the expressive name of _Chorda_, little use, I think, can be made in the way of design. The mere collector has to wind them assiduously into a coil in his herbarium; and in their native element the only purpose they seem to serve is to stop the passage of boats, or to drown unfortunate swimmers by entanglement about their legs; for, although often thirty or forty feet in length even on British shores, and not thicker at their base than a whipcord, they are extremely tough and tenacious.

The case is very different with the beautiful _Dictyotaccæ_, in which family is included the splendid _Padina pavonia_, with hues nearly as bright and as rich as the “eye-spots” on the tail of the glorious bird from which its specific name is taken. Such a marine beauty was not likely to escape the attention of even early naturalists, and we accordingly find it mentioned in the writings of Bauchin and others. Ellis, although he has no business with it, cannot resist the temptation to figure it in his famous book on Corallines.

In the genus _Cutleria_ we are presented with some attractive novelties, but the typical genus _Dictyota_ merits special attention.

If the number and variety of names by which an algal was known had any connection with its charms or its rarity, one