algæ, or sea-weeds, too. How insignificant appear our kelpweeds in comparison with the Lessonia of the Antarctic Zone, trees with forking and branching trunks covered with crimson brown, sinuated edged, and jagged-toothed leaves, or with blackish opaque foliage and twisted flexuous trunks, growing like submarine forests; or with the Nereocystis of the Aleutian islands, whose stem, never thicker than a packthread, extends to the length of forty fathoms or more, and expands at the summit into an inflated cylinder from which issues a leaf, which gradually grows wider near its top; not singly, not here and there a plant but areas of great extent covered with innumerable plants; or with the Macrocystis whose slender stem and numerous leaves are buoyed up by their expanded and swollen base, the stem so long that fifteen hundred feet has been reported by observers as within the limits of belief. These several kinds of expanded fronds are employed as utensils among savage people, while the trunks of many of these gigantic algae drifting on desert shores have been mistaken and gathered for fuel, supposed to be actual wood.

The structural arrangement of the cellular tissue on a number of the Melanosperms, giving to their fronds a peculiarly netted appearance when viewed through a magnifying glass, suggests a natural order, called Dictyotida, which signifies like a net. Externally there is quite a variety among these sea-weeds, and of them we may search for Punctaria in two species, both parasitic on other and larger sea-weeds about Boston Harbor, or even Asperococcus with an inflated frond, while the others delight in a flattened one. The seeds may be found in the minute dot-like clusters scattered over the surface of the plants. To this order belong the curious Padina pavonia and its allied Zonaria lobata, bearing no inapt resemblance to those richly zoned and velvetty fungi which grow out of old dead tree-trunks; but both these lovely algae are tropical and belong to our most southern states. The rest of the Melanosperms are either parasitic and minute, and to be gathered either accidentally or else

though strange and unusual in exterior, so infrequently that they hardly claim our present attention. In the structure of their seed-vessels and seeds they are objects of curious interest and beauty, but require a quick eye to detect the condition favorable to secure specimens, which when collected, must be submitted to the microscope to satisfy the enquirer.

If our excursion and lesson has convinced us that in the distribution of plants, the ocean, which to many, shuts out the chance of minute observation, forms no exception to the law of vegetation; each part of its vast bosom bearing, like the earth, its appropriate flowers, plants and fruits, a day or two among the sea-weeds will be well employed.

FOOT-NOTES FROM A PAGE OF SAND.

BY DR. ELLIOTT COUES, U. S. A.

IF those whom fashion and the weather drive from city follies and vices to the vices and follies of the seaside; who live in hotels and carriages and fancy the society of their kind the only sort desirable or possible, if such read at all by the sea shore, it is not from the broadest and most eloquent page before them. With eyes to see, blind; deaf, with ears to hear; to them, a blank, a void, beyond the titillation of social scandal. Others go out of doors afoot, looking and listening; in every object by their pathway a familiar thing; with every vibration of the air, a well known voice; with every odour a reminiscence. Alone by the sea? There

is no solitude-no escape for the naturalist, even though in a weak moment he wish it, from a multitude-no disentangling of self from the web of animate creatures of which he is one slender thread.

The sea, we know, is teeming with life-full of shapes

useful or curious, beautiful or monstrous; the waves themselves, in ceaseless change, incessantly battling with the land, seem life-like; but the sand itself, solid and motionless, looks lifeless. The great broad sheet that stretches along the coast seems to be now, as it always has been, inanimate. A vast bed of silica; and yet if not alive, what a sarcophagus it is of myriad lives since perished! If the poet says of dust in the crack of a door, "Great Cæsar's ashes here!" and attach to the mote and the man common and equal significance, yet farther than this the naturalist; for him, not the greatest pile that ever rose over emperors' remains-not the pyramids, tombs of Pharaohs, are so great, as this monument of life that Nature built-the simple sand. If ghosts be ever laid, here lie hosts, of creatures innumerable, vexing the mind in the attempt to conceive, never to compute, them; so minute that a grain of sand is prodigious beside. Creatures of wonderful, beautiful, varying shapes; creatures that ate and drank after their fashion and went on rejoicing or grieving till the day came. Let us write a name in the sand; the wave comes the ebb, the cradle,

the

flow, the grave of such short-lived creatures; what to these then, that write their name in the "sands of time;" the coast of a continent their grave, the beach their monument, each sand-grain an epitaph.

How long this book has been making we do not know; no man's time will suffice him to turn and read even a single page. Reflection confounds; still we may stroll on, observant, if not thoughful; a letter, a point, an intelligible note, may catch the eye; and trifles enough have at least some pith. Say, at the moment, there is no living thing in sight. As a wave curls away from the mirrored sand, little bubbles play here and there for a few moments, and then too subside. Under the sand, where each bubble rose, lives a creature,

*And these too, are of a sort of limestone, called "nummulitic " because chiefly composed of vast numbers of certain Foraminifers (Nummulites). An ounce of Foraminiferous sand is estimated to contain upwards of four millions of these protozoans.

encased in shell armour, rarely seen alive, and scarcely known except by its casement, when this is thrown upon the beach; what some call a razor-shell, others Solen ensis. When the foot presses in yielding sand, surcharged with moisture, a slender jet of water spirts up; below is a clam (Mya arenaria); it dislikes the weight upon its elastic home, and remonstrates. There goes a groove in the sand, as if a child had wantonly dragged its copper-toed boot along, or some curious share had turned as curious a furrow; but the creature that made it has gone below, after what would have seemed to us, had we witnessed it, a tedious journey. Scattered here and there are large globular, yet essentially spiral, shells of the sea-snail (Neverita heros); the animal that lives in them made that mark, unfolding a great fleshy "foot," and gliding along, perhaps eating something as it went, with an organ that is mouth and limb in one. Where it is now, under the sand, are plenty more mail-clad things, of all shapes and sizes and colors; snug and secure, giving no sign of their presence. The sand is not only a great closet of foraminiferous skeletons; it is full of flesh and blood.

But we may look for signs from above as well as under the earth, or from the waters beneath; the sand tattles many pleasant, harmless secrets, if we only attend. Here are foot-notes again, this time of real steps from real feet; the next tide will wash them out; but perhaps some one of them, -the one chance of millions-may be left to signal, centuries hence, as much as they tell now. They are wedgeshaped, and meaningless as the cuneiform characters upon a Babylonic obelisk, unless the key to the cryptogram is found; for this, the lock must first be examined to the last detail, and it is surprising how many details there are. The imprints are in two parallel lines, an inch or so apart; each impression is two or three inches in advance of the next one behind; none of them are in pairs, but each one of one line is opposite the middle of the interval between two of the

other line; they are steps as regular as a man's, only so small. Each mark is fan-shaped; it consists of three little lines less than an inch long, spreading apart at one extremity, joined at the other; at the joined end, and also just in front of it, a flat depression of the sand is barely visible. So much : now following the track we see it run straight a yard or more, then twist into a confused ball, then shoot out straight; again then stop, with a pair of the foot-prints opposite each other, different from the other end of the track, that begun as two or three little indistinct pits or scratches, not forming perfect impressions of a foot; where the track twisted there are several little round holes in the sand. The whole track commenced and finished upon the open sand. The creature that made it could not, then, have come out of either the sand or the water; as there are no fireanimals now days, it must have come down from the air; a two-legged flying thing—a bird. To determine this; and next, what kind of bird it was, every one of the trivial points of the description just given must be taken into ac

count.

It is a bit of autobiography; the story of an invitation to dine, acceptance, a repast, an alarm at the table, a hasty retreat. A bird came on wing, lowering till the tips of its toes just touched the sand, gliding half on wing, half a foot, until the impetus of flight was exhausted; then folding its wings, but not pausing, for already a quick eye spied something inviting; a hasty pecking and probing to this side and that, where we found the lines entangled; a short run on after more food; then a suspicious object attracted its attention; it stood stock-still (just where the marks were in a pair) till, thoroughly alarmed, it sprang on wing and was off. So much is perfectly plain and intelligible; it may be not quite so easy to find out what the bird was, for we will shut the "back-stairs" door and allow no guessing, but go honestly about our induction, as if we only knew of dead birds in the closet, and had never seen a live one.