Memorials of John Ray / edited by Edwin Lankester.

Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memorials of John Ray / edited by Edwin Lankester. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    165/242 (page 147)
    somewhat bigger than the largest packthread commonly sold m shops. Also two sorts of Mucus marinus, besides the common Phasganoides | Alavia esculenta, Bory ?| The one |Zaminaria saccharina, Lamour,| ariseth with a round stalk about the bigness of a finger, more or less, and about a foot long, and then follows one only single undivided broad leaf of a yard or more long, and some- times three or four mches broad, wrought as it were all along with extuberant lines waved to and fro; it some- what resembles a broad wrought leathern girdle or belt ; the other, which is the fucus marinus secundus, Dod. Park. | Zimanthaha lorea, Lyngb.| is branched at some distance from the root, and narrow, resembling thongs of whit- leather. A little above the rest we found, in all that we observed, a round circle like a rotula about the stalk, of about an inch diameter or more, of the same substance with the fucus, but thinner. ‘This plant might be better expressed by a figure than described by words. All along in the cliffs and on the shore, are found in great plenty the serpent-stones, called by naturalists in Latin cornua ammonis. We were somewhat puzzled to get them entire out of their matrices, the usual way of heating them in the fire very hot, and then quenching them in the water, not always succeeding ; many of these stones were imperfect. In this cliff or rock (which is nothing but alum-mine*) we found also plenty of the lapides belemnites, or thunder-stones. Another sort of stones we found there resembling cockles, or rather a sort of muscles. There is also /apis gagates or jet, found in the cliffs hereabout; but we met not with any besides a stone, which is, or resembles brass-mine. The country people hereabout told: us the story related by Camden, that wild geese, if once they ight in Whitby strand, cannot rise again or fly away, as the rhyme is : « Tf the wild goose lights in Whitby strand, The least bearn that is, may take her up in his hand.” * The term “mine” was formerly used as “ore,” and here refers to the lias beds of Whitby, which contain alumina.—E. L.