showed that it is like no Fucus of
our shores, or anything we ever saw before. The difference of look
is undefinable in words, but clear enough. One sees in a moment
that the Sargassos, of which there are several species on Tropical
shores, are a genus of themselves and by themselves; and a certain
awe may, if the beholder be at once scientific and poetical, come
over him at the first sight of this famous and unique variety
thereof, which has lost ages since the habit of growing on rock or
sea-bottom, but propagates itself for ever floating; and feeds among
its branches a whole family of fish, crabs, cuttlefish, zoophytes,
mollusks, which, like the plant which shelters them, are found
nowhere else in the world. And that awe, springing from 'the
scientific use of the imagination,' would be increased if he
recollected the theory--not altogether impossible--that this
sargasso (and possibly some of the animals which cling to it) marks
the site of an Atlantic continent, sunk long ages since; and that,
transformed by the necessities of life from a rooting to a floating
plant,

'Still it remembers its august abodes,'

and wanders round and round as if in search of the rocks where it
once grew. We looked eagerly day by day for more and more gulf-
weed, hoping that

'Slimy things would crawl with legs
Upon that slimy sea,'

and thought of the memorable day when Columbus's ship first plunged
her bows into the tangled 'ocean meadow,' and the sailors, naturally
enough, were ready to mutiny, fearing hidden shoals, ignorant that
they had four miles of blue water beneath their keel, and half
recollecting old Greek and Phoenician legends of a weedy sea off the
coast of Africa, where the vegetation stopped the ships and kept
them entangled till all on board were starved.

Day after day we passed more and more of it, often in long
processions, ranged in the direction of the wind; while, a few feet
below the surface, here and there floated large fronds of a lettuce-
like weed, seemingly an ulva, the bright green of which, as well as
the rich orange hue of the sargasso, brought out by contrast the
intense blue of the water.

Very remarkable, meanwhile, and unexpected, was the opacity and
seeming solidity of the ocean when looked down on from the bows.
Whether sapphire under the sunlight, or all but black under the
clouds, or laced and streaked with beads of foam, rising out of the