OF NEW SOUTH WALES. 293 



aud Australian science is deeply indebted to him for what he has 

 effected. But while the fossil organisms have thus received such 

 attention, the living forms have remained unknown, and this 

 anomaly was the more unsatisfactory as consequently no satis- 

 factory conclusion could be formed as to the age of the beds. 

 Except a few forms of a wide range which had been dredged up 

 in tropical seas, none of our corals were known to be living, and 

 whether any or all of them might not be found still living in 

 Australian seas there were no data upon which even to found a 

 guess. It is true that some Australian corals had been cited by 

 Messrs. Edwards and Haime from the explorations of various 

 naturalists, most of all Messrs. Quoy and Gaimard, but none of 

 them were deep-sea forms, and only very few Australian, New 

 Zealand being the place where the most abundant collections 

 were made. Professor Duncan has with great care extracted all 

 the corals referred to as Australian from various works, princi- 

 pally however from the Histoire Nat. des Gorallaires of Messrs. 

 M. Edwards and Haime. This list, as I shall show hereafter, 

 gives no reliable information. Naturalists have had a custom of 

 noting as Australian all the species that were found there. This 

 would convey no more information than if a species were labelled 

 Africa. The result is that tropical and reef building forms have 

 been confounded with simple and extratropical Madreporaria, 

 which does not give the slightest help towards elucidating the 

 relations of our Australian fossil forms. We must add to this 

 the confusion arising from geographical mistakes, very common 

 among the older French naturalists. The species are often 

 called Australian, which come from the South Pacific Islands, and 

 " Terre de Van Diem an" of North Australia has been cited as 

 Tasmania. I need hardly say that with my limited opportu- 

 nities for comparison, &c, I did not think of approaching the 

 subject with a hope of throwing any light upon it, or lessening 

 the confusion. In my geological and zoological studies extend- 

 ing over 23 years of a life in Australia, I have often met speci- 

 mens of corals both living and fossil ; some of them I sent home 

 to men of science, and some I have kept by me or presented to 



