imes, and when returning
homewards in the evening along the shore, it furnished me with amusement
enough to mark the character of the several plants of both floras that
thus meet and cross each other, and the appearances which they assume
when inhabiting each the other's province. On the side of the land,
beds of thrift, with its gay flowers the sea-pinks, occupied great
prominent cushions, that stood up like little islets amid the flowing
sea, and were covered over by salt water during stream-tides to the
depth of from eighteen inches to two feet. With these there occasionally
mingled spikes of the sea-lavender; and now and then, though more
rarely, a _sea-aster_, that might be seen raising above the calm surface
its composite flowers, with their bright yellow staminal pods, and their
pale purple petals. Far beyond, however, even the cushions of thrift, I
could trace the fleshy, jointed stems of the glass-wort, rising out of
the mud, but becoming diminutive and branchless as I followed them
downwards, till at depths where they must have been frequently swum over
by the young coal-fish and the flounder, they appeared as mere fleshy
spikes, scarce an inch in height, and then ceased. On the side of the
sea it was the various fucoids that rose highest along the beach: the
serrated focus barely met the salt-wort; but the bladder-bearing fucus
(_fucus nodosus_) mingled its brown fronds not unfrequently with the
crimson flowers of the thrift, and the vesicular fucus (_fucus
vesiculosus_) rose higher still, to enter into strange companionship
with the sea-side plantains and the common scurvy-grass. Green
enteromorpha of two species--_E. compressa_ and _E. intestinalis_--I
also found abundant along the edges of the thrift-beds; and it struck me
as curious at the time, that while most of the land-plants which had
thus descended beyond the sea-level were of the high dicotyledonous
division, the sea-weeds with which they mingled their leaves and
seed-vessels were low in their standing--fuci and enteromorpha--plants
at least not higher than their kindred cryptogamia, the lichens and
mosses of the land. Far beyond, in the outer reaches of the bay, where
land-plants never approached, there were meadows of a submarine
vegetation, of (for the sea) a comparatively high character. Their
numerous plants (_zostera marina_) had true roots, and true leaves, and
true flowers; and their spikes ripened amid the salt waters towards the
close of a