BY E. F. KALLMANN. 329 



Lendenfeld's description. As this, the only specimen avail- 

 able, is small, incomplete, and much damaged, it unfortu- 

 nately affords but little information regarding the external 

 features of the species ; and with respect to these, accordingly, 

 I can only quote the original description, which was based 

 apparently upon several specimens. 



iJexcrljJtion. — "Massive, lobose, horizontally: extended, more 

 or less incrusting sponges, with dome-shaped protuberances on 

 the upper surface, on the summits of which the circular, 3 to 

 5mm. wide, oscula are situated. Surface smooth. The sponge 

 attains a height of 30mm., a length of 150 to 200mm., and a 

 width of 100mm. Colour in the living state rosy red, in spirit 

 grey." The consistency is soft and fragile, and the texture 

 slightly porous. A very thin and delicate, non-separable, der- 

 mal membrane is present, and when this is removed (by cut- 

 ting a thin shaving from the surface) the structure immediate- 

 ly beneath is seen to be minutely and irregularly honeycomb- 

 like. 



The skeleton-reticulation (as it appears in rather thin sec- 

 tions) does not extend continuously, as is perhaps usually the 

 case in Reniera, but is interrupted by many wider or narrower 

 gaps in which there occur only a comparatively few scattered 

 spicules. The pattern of the reticulation is very irregular. 

 Main fibres, 3 to 5 spicules broad, usually not traceable for 

 any considerable distance and not disposed in orderly paral- 

 lelism with one another, run at varying distances apart in a 

 general surfaceward direction ; and between these, in addition 

 to some inter-reticulating, 2 to 3 spicules broad, connecting 

 fibres, is a unispicular meshwork, the meshes of which, for the 

 most part, are formed not of spicules placed end to end, but 

 of intercrossing spicules. A noteworthy feature of the skele- 

 ton, though one which perhaps is not uncommon in Reniera, 

 is the occurrence here and there, only at irregular and very 

 wide intervals, of broad strings of loosely associated parallel 

 spicules, which appear to be without relation to the rest of the 

 skeleton or to one another, and run in various directions 



