Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 2.djvu/300

266 become twisted together by rolling in the heavy surf, till they form enormous vegetable cables, much thicker than the human body, and several hundred feet in length. In some parts, the beach is so cumbered with these masses that walking becomes quite laborious; the pedestrian sinks frequently to the knees in the decaying heaps, and animal substance being also caught up, as in a net, the traveller's progress is rendered both offensive and tedious. Many most rare and beautiful sea-weeds may be detected here, either torn from inaccessible rocks far out to sea with the larger kinds, or growing parasitically upon them. The green, pink, and purple lavers of Great Britain may be readily recognised: though many of them are not found in the intervening warm latitudes, they re-appear in the cold seas of the opposite hemisphere; together with others, not exactly the same species, but representatives, in the southern ocean, of those sea-weeds which inhabit the northern. They remind the botanist of home, while they tell him he is not there. One gigantic genus is particularly abundant in the seas near the Falklands and Cape Horn, and surpasses all others in bulk. It is called Lessonia (after the naturalist of Captain Duperrey's expedition), and altogether resembles a tree in its mode of growth. The stem or trunk attaches itself by clasping fibres to the rocks, always beyond high- water mark: it attains a height of eight or ten feet and the thickness of a man's thigh: it branches upwards; and the ends of the