Twelve knots an hour is a pace sufficient to tear off the weed, as it is hauled alongside, all living things which are not rooted to it.

We got, therefore, no Crustacea; neither did we get a single specimen of the Calamaries, {8} which may be described as cuttlefish carrying hooks on their arms as well as suckers, the lingering descendants of a most ancient form, which existed at least as far back as the era of the shallow oolitic seas, x or y thousand years ago.

A tiny curled Spirorbis, a Lepraria, with its thousandfold cells, and a tiny polype belonging to the Campanularias, with a creeping stem, which sends up here and there a yellow-stalked bell, were all the parasites we saw.

But the sargasso itself is a curious instance of the fashion in which one form so often mimics another of a quite different family.

When fresh out of the water it resembles not a sea-weed so much as a sprig of some willow-leaved shrub, burdened with yellow berries, large and small; for every broken bit of it seems growing, and throwing out ever new berries and leaves-- or what, for want of a better word, must be called leaves in a sea- weed.