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,—
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
member at least of the characteristic group, the Dictyota atomaria ought to be—as it really is—both rare and beautiful. The ancient nomen triviale of Phasiana expresses well, in its allusion to the plumage of that handsome bird, the barred and zigzag markings caused by the scattering in the substance of the frond—almost as one would cast grains of sand or seeds by the hand—of the dark-coloured spores or germs. The whole plant, too, exhibits those most delicate gradations of the primitive hue which are not the least remarkable characteristic of all sea-weeds. And in what are our designers more deficient—especially those employed in the decoration of our houses—than in simple and delicate contrasts, or more especially in those almost insensible gradations of colours which are so admirable in their effect, and which are so invariably presented to us alike in the sombre olive and in the bright greens and reds of the sea-weeds? We have no power to express these natural gradations in our woodcuts, but there is certainly much in this way worthy of patient study. In this large and extensive family there are yet more instances of how various sections and magnificent portions may possess artistic value. The section of a sorus of Stilophora rhizodes seems, for example, so like the representation of a fragment of jewellery, that it cannot fail to excite wonder that a source so prolific should have been neglected by our workers in gold and silver, and our setters of pearls and precious stones.
The Mesogloia vermicularis, one of the gelatinous Chordariaceæ, is an ugly weed, but the filaments of the fronds are worthy, notwithstanding, of being placed under the power of the microscope and viewed by an artist.
So, too, with the hollow cottony Leathesia, looking like a macerated walnut tufting the surface of the rock: only peer into it with microscopic vision, and a forest of crystal fibres, composed of divided cells, the lower ones long and slender, the upper shorter, and supporting little hyaline half-moons on their cusps, springs into existence. The tiny tufts of the Elachista and Myrionema abound in bead-chain fibres, while the genera Cladostephus and Sphacelaria offer more visible patterns of a kind at once unleaf-like and novel. The Sphacelaria plumosa, so wiry and feathery, resembles those curious members of the animal kingdom, the Sertulariæ, as which it is almost as rigid and as elegant; while the small tufts of the rare Sphacelaria ramosa are again charming microscopic objects.
The family Ectocarpaceæ contains a fund of marvellous ideas. One more genus of British olive weeds alone remains to be mentioned, consisting of two little parasitic species not uncommon on the fronds of Chorda lomentaria; but though curious and singular in construction, they offer nothing so tempting as many of those we have been compelled to pass over in silence.
For the purpose of study, the Melanosperms offer a never-failing supply, always accessible at low water; but should opportunity arise of acquiring a knowledge of the Rhodosperms, with their fairy forms and brilliant hues, it should not be neglected, for these deep-water algals seldom reach us but in broken plants washed ashore; and dried specimens, flattened and faded, cease to be models for study. As to the Chlorosperms, the Ulvæ are full of grace and beauty, and in the south of England they are served at table as a relish to roast meat, under the title of laver, and which is now sold in many London shops. The Ulva linza, figured at p. 107, is a good type of the graceful outline of this elegant family of sea-weeds.
Oft beneath the warm and brilliant rays of summer’s sun, in shallow skiff, I have glided on the calm and polished surface of the sea—the mirror of the glowing sky and heavens beyond—over the dark forests of tangle waving in the tide, and plucked the pellucid limpets browsing on their stems; and, peering down into the rugged dells below, have seen the star-fish crawl with sucker-arms along the rocks, where whelks drill holes in shells of stone-clad molluscs, to feed upon their soft and luscious flesh; where sea-anemones, with outspread tentacles, make gardens of living flowers; and awkward crabs peep out from darksome nooks at glittering fish, then scramble sidelong back again into their holes.
In winter, by the raging waves—when skaters swift o’er slippery ice with rapid pace were gliding; when ears were tingling with the biting cold, and tender people roasting over blazing fires—I have paced along the congealed sands to see the shell-fish frozen hard and fast, glued to the rocks; and sea-weeds, crisp and rigid, recover life and elasticity in the flowing tide.
In time of spring I have hunted over the slippery meadows of our shores for the instinct-led travellers from the deep, coming to the shallow tidal zone to propagate their tribes. And in the golden season I have watched the sportive play, in rocky pools o’ershadowed by these graceful weeds, of iridescent annelide and cilia-paddled beroe—have tracked the skipping shrimps along the silvery sands, or have patiently followed the Patella vulgaris in its solemn march to graze upon the verdant ulvæ, and again returning at the change of tide to adjust its conical house with stately nicety on its proper site.
SNOW, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, is suggestive of a soft flocculent matter of considerable opacity, falling in flakes, and, as compared with water, of little density—a foot of fresh-fallen snow producing but from a tenth to a twelfth part of water. Snow, however, does not always fall in flakes; under certain conditions of atmosphere and temperature it occasionally falls in groups of slender needle-like particles or spiculæ, which under the microscope exhibit no structural detail worthy of remark, but are irregular and jagged in outline. This is one of the most imperfect forms of snow crystallization, and occurs generally at a temperature but little above freezing, and at the commencement of a severe and continued frost, or immediately preceding a general thaw.
At other times a light feathery snow may be seen to fall, composed almost entirely of stars of six spiculæ or radii, united in the centre by a white molecule. These are seldom less than from four to five tenths of an inch in diameter, and are generally collected in tufts of half-a-dozen or more together, which in calm weather waft uninjured to the ground. Sometimes these are mixed with other stars of more intricate figure, to be spoken of presently. Fig. 1 illustrates this variety, and is enlarged to double the proportions of the original.
Sometimes a heavy fall of ordinary snow may be accompanied by a number of minute specks, glistening among the flakes like fragments of talc or mica, as seen sparkling in a mass of granite. On careful investigation these prove to be thin laminated hexagons of the most perfect delicacy and symmetry of form, as shown in Fig. 2.
The hexagon and star being the base of all the crystals of snow yet observed, we will proceed to show how the more elaborate figures are compounded of these two primary elements.
To explain various peculiarities of structure which occur in several of the larger drawings, we will refer to the process of crystallization as carried on at low temperatures on the surface of still or gently-moving water.
Water freezes at an angle of 60°. On its first congelation, under favourable circumstances for observation, we perceive in parts, generally about the centre and around the margin, a corrugation of its surface. This corrugation presently discovers a series of distinct figures, needle-like in form, and analogous to the spiculæ of snow. As the process continues, to each of these needles, while yet forming, a serrated incrustation of leafy or arborescent character is attaching itself, so that in time the greater number of them become each the centre of a crystalline pinna, not unlike a frond of the lady fern. Fig. 25 (page 140) is a sketch of one, the size of the original, as observed by T. G. Rylands, Esq., of Warrington, and sent to us during the severe winter of 1855. The overlapping observable on one side of the pinna is a peculiarity generally to be found in three out of the six leaves forming the entire crystal.
Fig. 26 (page 141) represents the crystal when complete; the drawing was made by ourselves, and gives with great exactitude the figure of the needles, which, it will be observed, diverge from the main stem uniformly at an angle of 60°. The position maintained by them around the centre of the crystal is beautifully adaptive, and well worth examination.
It is not always that the primitive spiculæ are divergent in groups of six. At times they arrange themselves irregularly in clusters, and crystallization proceeds with results of a character
somewhat different, but scarcely less beautiful, of which Fig. 27 (page 142) may be considered a type. This is analogous to the fanciful forms of frost seen on the interior of a pane of glass, and is frequently to be found where the water is very shallow, and where its mixture with some gritty substance, or blade of grass, or other obstruction, has in all probability interfered with a more geometric arrangement. By degrees the whole surface of the water becomes interlaced with needles and pinnæ, whether singly or in groups, and thin laminated surfaces of ice which cover all interstices. Then, according to external influences, the ice either thickens, obliterating all this beautiful tracery, or it melts away before the rising temperature of the day. It often happens, however, that these processes occur after dark, or that the water freezes so rapidly as to disappoint the wishes of the observer. At moderate temperatures these changes are best observed; but, in our opinion, they are somewhat dependent on other atmospheric conditions. The formation of the needles is common to the freezing of water under all circumstances, and they vary from a few inches to a few feet in length.
To return to the crystals of snow. Fig. 3 (page 136) is another elementary figure, common to temperatures about the freezing-point; it is not often less than half an inch in diameter, and is a miniature copy of the water crystal.
Another simple order of figures, and containing within themselves the germ of the most symmetrical combinations, is that of which Fig. 4 and 5 (page 136) are types; they exhibit secondary spiculæ diverging from the principal radii at an angle of 60°.
Around the simple it frequently happens that a secondary and smaller star is arranged, as in Fig. 6 (page 136), the radii of which are intermediate between those of the former. An angle of 30° is, however, of unfrequent occurrence, and it seems probable that in this and similar cases it is the union of two crystals of distinct hexagonal formation.
Sometimes it happens that the secondary spiculæ, which we see in Fig. 4 and 5, are continued down the main radii until they form a contact with each other, as in Fig. 7 (page 137). The star thus enclosed about the centre generally becomes laminated and of great transparency. In other varieties, as in Fig. 8 (page 137), it is intersected by the rays of the secondary or intermediate crystal.
Having traced the elementary principles of these figures to the first formation of a simple nucleus, we will proceed to the consideration of the more compound varieties, in which the nucleus is a conspicuous element of construction.
The figures we have been considering, although possessed of unity of design in a high degree, are found to exhibit no great perfection of structural detail when examined beneath a lens; those that we are about to inquire into belong to a more perfect order, much more minute and very compound.
Fig. 28 is a figure of this class, much enlarged and drawn as seen beneath a microscope. It was highly crystallized, and the angles and planes of which it is composed were sharply and well defined. The prisms at the end of the radii were cut into facets, and glistened with brilliancy, as did the six prisms around the centre. The radial arms were sharply cut, six-sided shafts, very different from the snowy rounded spiculæ of the elementary figures. It was easily discernible to the naked eye, and principally those parts which are white in the engraving, and which communicate to the copy very much the effect of the original when under the full influence of direct light. The centre is laminated, hexagonal in form, and within it we perceive the secondary star of prisms; also that each addition to the radii diverges at an angle of 60°.
Fig. 29 is another, highly crystallized, and composed of parallel prisms, divergent from the radial arms at an angle of 60°, and without nucleus. The irregular blade-like terminations arise from an ill-advised eagerness in the observation of their originally very complicated structure, by which they were in a moment dissolved, without injury, however, to the symmetry of the figure.
Fig. 30 is a beautiful compound of the higher order of crystallized bodies with the more elementary, the nucleus belonging to the former, and the radii at their extremities to the
latter. This at first sight appears an anomaly; but we explain it on the supposition that the entire structure of the original crystal has been of a high order, the shafts six-sided, as they remain still at their base, and the leafy incrustrations to have been regularly distributed prisms, as in the preceding figure; that the crystal, in its descent, has passed through various temperatures of intense cold, probably exchanged for a warmer at one instant of time, in which it has partially thawed, and again passing into a cold stratum in approaching the ground, has been once more congealed, giving rise to the white opacity and irregular form of its terminations. And this explanation is the more reasonable, as will be gathered from a description of the dissolving or thawing of these bodies.
Fig. 31 is a crystal seen just previous to its returning to the primitive drop of water. Originally composed of the ordinary radial arms, each supporting prisms of the form seen in Fig. 29, and with a simple hexagonal nucleus, under the influence of a very slightly increased temperature the rigidity of each line has become relaxed, whilst the crystalline matter, all but fluid and no longer heaped up into prisms, is distributed over a wider area, according to the laws of attraction and corresponding area of surface.
A very different order of figures are those of which Fig. 32, 33, 34, and 35 are types. The originals were exceedingly small—so minute, indeed, that the specks containing all these beauties of detail were almost inappreciable to the naked eye. It will readily be perceived that they differ greatly from the order arising out of the primitive star or its secondary radii. The base of these must be referred to the hexagon, as shown at Fig. 2.The most highly elaborate of our illustrations, shown at Fig. 33, exhibited a succession of planes raised one above another, the centre of each radial arm intersected by a slender crystalline shaft laden with delicate prisms. Fig. 35 preserves more the form of the ordinary hexagon, and was cut very regularly into facets. Of Fig. 34 and 35 we were unable to observe the exact disposition of the raised surfaces, and have delineated the outline only: these figures fell, with several others far more complicated, during the continuance of a very unusual degree of cold for these latitudes.
We have thus far endeavoured to show the true bases of construction, and how that crystallization proceeds onwards from the simple forms to the more complex, and have selected from numerous varieties a few of the best types illustrative of this progress. Our limits will scarcely permit us further to individualise these beautiful creations; yet, not to mislead, it is necessary to refer to an intermediate order, in which the hexagon star is laden with divergent spiculæ between groups of prisms. Fig. 36, selected from this very numerous class of figures, was one of several observed during the cold weather, following upon the general thaw, which terminated the long-continued and severe frost of 1855. The spiculæ were icicle-like, of the utmost delicacy, opaque, and well defined; the prisms, on the contrary, were watery, almost rounded, and, as it seemed, on the verge of dissolution. The entire figure had the appearance of two distinct orders of formation—the prisms which belong to a very low temperature, and the spiculæ which are commonly formed at and about the freezing-point. Fig. 37 is another of the same class, and in a very intermediate state; the additions to the main radii are neither prisms nor spiculæ, yet partaking of the character of both: its peculiarity consists in the tertiary incrustations being placed downwards towards the centre. This form has been observed only during very severe cold.
Fig. 38 is somewhat analogous to the crystals of water; its centre is hexagonal, but the prisms are irregular crystalline incrustations of the utmost delicacy and transparency; it was of large size, fully half an inch in diameter, and glistening like a fragment of talc among the snow-flakes, was discernible at a considerable distance.
Fig. 39 (page 156) is a specimen of a double crystal; that is, two similar crystals united by an axis at right angles to the plane of each. It is highly complex, and the effect of each is more than doubled by the arrangement. Crystals so united are not unfrequent in severe weather.
During one winter our observations numbered nearly two hundred varieties.