ALCYONARIAN CORALS 129 



medium thickness and may be smooth or covered with 

 numerous irregularly arranged verrucae. 



Juncella has received various popular names such as 

 Sea-rope, Sea-stalk, Sea-whip, and when stripped of its 

 coenenchym it is used by the natives of the tropical 

 countries in which it is found as a walking-stick and for 

 other purposes, but it does not seem to have been used 

 in the time of Rumphius by the Malays for medical pur- 

 poses, as were so many of the other flexible corals. 



Another very interesting family of these corals is the 

 Primnoidae, in which the polyps are not retractile into the 

 coenenchym and are protected by an elaborate mail of 

 overlapping calcareous scales. The axis is unjointed and 

 horny, but as with the Gorgonellidae the horny substance 

 is impregnated with calcium carbonate. 



Primxoa. — Most of the genera and species of this 

 family live in deep water and are not very familiar 

 objects in museums, but there is one species, Primnoa 

 reseda, which is occasionally found in British waters 

 and may be taken as an example of its kind for a short 

 description. 



There is a quaint description of this species in Parkinson's 

 Theatre of Plants (1640), p. 1301, where it is called Reseda 

 marina, or the Base wilde Rocket of the Sea : " Clusius in 

 his sixte booke of Exotickes and sixt Chapter saith he had 

 this at Amsterdam, and for the rarenesse, there set it forth 

 to be of a hard woody substance, crusted over with the 

 saltnesse of the Sea, being not the whole plant, but much 

 of the lower parts, broken away, yet containing sundry 

 branches, covered upwards, with sundry rough cups or 

 vessels, hanging downewards, of a whitish ash colour, not 

 much unlike unto the seed vessels of Reseda when they are 

 ripe, but much lesse, and so brittle that they might be 

 rubbed to pouther between the fingers." 



From this account it will be seen that the popular 

 English name for it, the Sea-mignonette, is one of long 

 standing. 



The branching of the colony of this species is irregularly 



K 



