Conferva bombycina

The Confervaceae form a section of the great family of the Algae, better known to us as sea weeds, although a large proportion of them inhabit fresh and brackish water, as well as the ocean. None of the Algae are highly constituted, consisting as they do purely of cellular matter without a trace of vascular tissue. In fact they stand at the very bottom of nature's ladder; varying, however, greatly in point of size from the microscopic speck to the huge Gulf weed, whose tangled branches reach for hundreds of feet in extent.