Called Sea-girdles, in England; Tangle, in Scotland; Sea-staff, Sea-wand, Cows'-tails, and Red-ware in the Orkneys. These great thick stems are cut up by the fisher-boys as handles for knives or hooks. When it is fresh the blade is stuck in, and as the stem dries it hardens, contracts closely and firmly, embracing the hilt of the blade. It takes some months to be quite firm, and then is hard and shrivelled, very like hart's-horn.*

"Look reverently at it," says Mrs. Lane Clarke, in her charming " Common Seaweeds." "Do you know that a little slice under the microscope will show you a tissue of delicate cells in which God has stored up one of the most precious remedies for suffering mankind? that He has given the Laminaria-stem power to abstract from the sea a precious substance called Iodine - that which alone can relieve the pale, sad sufferer from scrofula, reduce the swollen glands, check the ravages of cancer, act on the torpid liver, ease the racking pains of rheumatism, give the flush of health to the wasted weary invalid? Yes - this is hidden in that rough brown stem, brought out by fire in the kelp-kilns of Ireland and Scotland. Another use is its importance in the manufacture of glass: our fragile beautiful glass springs from the old brown seaweed.

"Some shipwrecked sailors, making a fire with the dried weed amidst fine river sand, found the strange transparent substance in the ashes which gave the first hint of our window panes. What should we have done for soap without those sticks of tangle? And do we remember that iodine, like the violet mist of the Arabian tales, rises from the burning kelp - a genie whose power gives back the lost, the absent, the beloved? Did not the calotype, the daguerreotype, owe their birth to this subtile essence, compelling the sun itself to be a portrait painter?

"Well may those banners float out upon the sea, and well may we ponder on the tangled fronds cast up by the storm. There is subject for a long lesson and for a song of praise in the weather-beaten stems of old Laminaria Digitata".