An amazing amount of fiction and nonsense has been written about the sargasso weed, but the truth is actually more unbelievable. Though we see it in such immense patches, and although for days the ocean may be flecked with the scattered heads of the weed, yet it is no more at home in mid-ocean than the falling leaves in autumn may claim as their place of abode, the breeze which whirls them about, or the moss upon which at last they come to rest. Along the coast of Central America the sargasso weed grows, clinging, as is the way with seaweeds, to coral and rock and shell, and flowering and fruiting after its lowly fashion. The berry-like bladders with which the stems are strung, are filled with gas and enable the plants to maintain their position regardless of the state of the tide. Vast quantities are torn away by the waves and drift out to sea and these stray masses are what we see on every trip south, and which, caught in the great mid-ocean eddy, form the so-called Sargasso Sea. Just as the unfailing fall of dead leaves has brought about a forest loving clique of brown and russet colored small folk--frogs, crickets, lizards, birds and mammals which spend much of their life hiding beneath or living upon the brown dead leaves, so this never-ending drift of weed has evolved about it a little world of life, a microcosmos of great intimacy, striving by imitation of frond and berry and color to avoid some of the host of enemies forever on the lookout. It is possible to place a bit of weed in a tumbler of salt water and have a dozen people examine it without seeing anything but a yellowish brown frond with many long, narrow leaves and a number of berry-like structures. Here and there are patches of thin ivory-white shells--tiny whorls glued closely to the surface of the leaves. Yet on this same small piece of weed there may be several good-sized crabs, slug-like creatures, shrimps and a fish two or three inches in length. Until they move, the eye is powerless to detach them. No two are alike; the little frog-fish is mottled and striped, with many small flabby filaments, and apparently ragged fins, with curious hand-like fore limbs which clutch the fronds closely. The pipe-fish and sea-horses are draped and ragged, and splashed with yellow and brown, the slugs are simply flaccid stems or leaves, and the crabs are beyond belief, living bits of weed. Some are clear yellow, others are mottled, others again have white enameled spots like the small masses of tiny shells. The little shrimps are mere ghosts of life, transparent, yielding to every movement of the water--altogether marvelous. Then there are other beings, blue like the sea, white like the foam, or translucent bits of disembodied organs. This is all absorbingly wonderful, but the unreality of this little world's existence, the remembrance of its instability is always present, and the tragedy of the immediate future looms large.