First Forms of Vegetation Author:Hugh MacMillan General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1874 Original Publisher: Macmillan Subjects: Nature / Plants Science / Life Sciences / Botany Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you... more » get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III. FRESH-WATER ALGJE. j| N these days of popular science, when the most abstruse subjects come to us in forms as light and easy as the whisperings of confidential friends, or the chit-chat of the family circle, no department of natural history is more extensively and successfully studied than that which relates to the algae or sea-weeds. And this need not be wondered at, for there is no class of plants more interesting, whether we regard the beauty of their colours, the gracefulness and variety of their forms, or the romantic situations in which they occur. The invention of that elegant ornament of the parlour and drawing-room, the aquarium, now so popular, has afforded great facilities for the study of these plants, under conditions and circumstances closely analogous to those of their native haunts; and much insight has in consequence been obtained into their functions and habits, which would otherwise either remain in obscurity, or be revealed only by the chance fortune of the hour. It would be interesting to state some of the novel facts thus elicited. But this would be irrelevant, as our attention in this chapter is to be occupied not with the history of the algae or seaweeds as a whole, but only with that distinct and well-marked section of the family which inhabits fresh water exclusively, whose economy is altogether peculiar, and whose forms are widely different from the lovely Plocamiums and Deles- serias, which we frequently observe with admiration in our wanderings along the sea-shore. T...« less