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Updated: May 19, 2025
Look at the great sea-tang, the Fucus giganteus: this plant, according to Cook, reaches a height of 360 feet, and a single specimen, with its immense ramifications, nourishes thousands of marine animals, yet its root is a small body, no larger than the fist. What nourishment can this draw from a naked rock, upon the surface of which there is no perceptible change?
The hind legs of the animal are twice as long as the front ones, and unbend like a spring. At the head of the flying troop was a male five feet high, a magnificent specimen of the macropus giganteus, an "old man," as the bushmen say. For four or five miles the chase was vigorously pursued.
Other extinct animals accompany the Mastodon giganteus in the post-glacial deposits of the United States, and this, taken with the fact that so few of the mollusca, even of the commencement of the cold period, differ from species now living is important, as refuting the hypothesis, for which some have contended, that the intensity of the glacial cold annihilated all the species in temperate and arctic latitudes.
The general absence of organic remains in the North American glacial formation makes it as difficult as in Europe to determine what mammalia lived on the continent at the time of the most intense refrigeration, or when extensive areas were becoming strewed over with glacial drift and erratic blocks, but it is certain that a large proboscidean now extinct, the Mastodon giganteus, Cuv., together with many other quadrupeds, some of them now living and others extinct, played a conspicuous part in the post-glacial era.
H. mollis, so called from the soft white down with which the leaves are covered, grows about 4 feet high. Leaves large, ovate, and sessile; growth of the plant upright, with hardly any branches; flowers pale yellow, about 3 inches across, not very ornamental. Cultivated at Kew, whence I had it. H. giganteus grows 10 feet high; stem much branched and disposed to curve.
"East of the Tinaja Alta or high tank range, lie the famous Sierras del Ajo, now United States territory. The mines are unquestionably of great value, and must become important, more particularly from their being situated in the neighborhood of the contemplated railway. The tall Cereus Giganteus and Agave Americana are found in abundance.
That in the United States the Mastodon giganteus was very abundant after the drift period, is evident from the fact that entire skeletons of this animal are met with in bogs and lacustrine deposits occupying hollows in the glacial drift. They sometimes occur in the bottom even of small ponds recently drained by the agriculturist for the sake of the shell-marl.
So great a magnitude was at first a cause of incredulity; but the subsequent discovery of the bones of the Moa or Dinornis of New Zealand, proved that, at a much later time, there had been feathered bipeds of even larger bulk, and the credibility of the Ornithichnites Giganteus has accordingly been established.
The Fucus giganteus of Solander. The stem of this remarkable seaweed, though but the thickness of a man's thumb, is often over one hundred and thirty yards in length, perhaps the longest of any known plant. It grows on every rock in Fuegian waters, from low-water mark to a depth of fifty or sixty fathoms, and among the most violent breakers.
Others, standing as erect as bushes and trees or tall branchless pillars crowned with magnificent flowers, their prickly armor sparkling, look boldly abroad over the glaring desert, making the strangest forests ever seen or dreamed of. Cereus giganteus, the grim chief of the desert tribe, is often thirty or forty feet high in southern Arizona.
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