At some seasons the water of certain lakes, usually quite clear and pure, becomes discoloured, turbid, and everywhere crowded with multitudes of tiny, bright, verdigris-green specks. The fish at once begin to sulk, refuse to take the fly, and live torpid at the bottom of the water. The minute green particles consist of a certain seaweed or alga. Mr. Phillips put the head of a common pin in the water so as to obtain a very small drop. When placed under a microscope, this minute amount of water was found to contain 300 individual algæ.[102] This was in Newton Mere (Shropshire), and as this lake extends over 115 acres, it is possible to imagine the millions upon millions of algæ which must have existed in it. The names of these seaweeds are many thousand times longer than the algæ themselves, and it is not really necessary to give them. One of them, however, _Aphanizomenon flos-aquæ_, has been noticed "tingeing with its delicate green hue the margin of the smallest of the Lochs Maben, in Dumfriesshire."[103] Yet it is not so big as the dot on the _i_ in its name. Many other cases have been recorded of lakes that were coloured sometimes a "pea-green," or even brown or red by similar tiny little seaweeds. As we shall see, the water of such lakes generally contains a very large amount of suspended or floating vegetable life. [102] Cooke, _British Freshwater Algæ_, on the authority of Phillips, _Trans. Shropshire Natural History Society_. [103] Dickie, _Journal Bot. Soc. Edin._, vol. 3, p. 79. Another curious appearance is _Gory Dew_. Patches of a deep blood-red or purple colour are found on the ground or on walls. They have just the appearance of recently-shed blood. This also is due to an alga (_Porphyridium cruentum_). Dr. Cooke quotes from Drayton as follows: "In the plain, near Hastings, where the Norman William, after his victory found King Harold slain, he built Battle Abbey, which at last, as divers other monasteries, grew to a town enough populous. Thereabout is a place which, after rain, always looks red, which some have attributed to a very bloody sweat of the earth, as crying to Heaven for vengeance of so great a slaughter." The ordinary "Rain of Blood" which appears on _not too fresh_ meat, and looks like minute specks of red-currant jelly, is due to one of the Bacteria (_Micrococcus prodigiosus_). The original algæ or seaweeds probably had descendants which migrated to the land and eventually after many geological periods became our flowering plants and ferns. But the earth has become so richly supplied with plants of all sorts and kinds that it is now by no means easy for any plant to find a roothold for its existence. So that a considerable number have been forced back to the water, and have accustomed themselves to live in or even under water in company with their lowly cousins, the seaweeds, who remained below its surface.