Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The
Colour Of These Leaves Is A Pale Green, And They Are Membranous And
Streaked Like Those Of The Adiantums And Gingko Biloba.
Their
surface is covered with stiff whitish hairs; before their opening
they are concave, and enveloped one in the other.
We observed no
mark of spontaneous motion, no sign of irritability, not even on
the application of galvanic electricity. The stem is not woody, but
almost of a horny substance, like the stem of the Gorgons. Azote
and phosphorus having been abundantly found in several cryptogamous
plants, an appeal to chemistry would be useless to determine
whether this organized substance belonged to the animal or
vegetable kingdom. Its great analogy to several sea-plants, with
adiantum leaves, especially the genus caulerpa of M. Lamoureux, of
which the Fucus proliter of Forskael is one of the numerous
species, engaged us to rank it provisionally among the sea-wracks,
and give it the name of Fucus vitifolius. The bristles which cover
this plant are found in several other fuci.* (* Fucus
lycopodioides, and F. hirsutus.) The leaf, examined with a
microscope at the instant we drew it up from the water, did not
present, it is true, those conglobate glands, or those opaque
points, which the parts of fructification in the genera of ulva and
fucus contain; but how often do we find seaweeds in such a state
that we cannot yet distinguish any trace of seeds in their
transparent parenchyma.
The vine-leaved fucus presents a physiological phenomenon of the
greatest interest.
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