Maim.] 22 



also almost always slightly clipping. I have also thought they sometimes 

 altered their course to the right or left without touching the surface 

 of the water, but it may have been owing to the wind. They will 

 often barely touch the surface of the water and rise again, keeping on 

 in the same or an altered course. There went a school of a dozen or 

 twenty this very minute, rising and falling slightly, and entering the 

 water and issuing from it again and again, and altering their course 

 for the distance of seventy-five to one hundred yards. The motion 

 of the fm is not always steady, as I have seen when they rose near the 

 ship and the sun struck favorably upon them, for in these cases the 

 motion was intermittent in velocity, though kept up all the time, 

 and might be represented by a line more or less shaded. I have ob- 

 served them fly thirty or forty yards without touching the water, 

 though I should say usually they would not go more than half that 

 distance. They do not usually rise much over a foot above the sur- 

 face of the w^ater, often much less, though one was said to have come 

 on board the other day, and to do that I should think must have risen 

 at least eight or ten feet. 



Mr. A. E. Verrill made a communication on the genus Xis- 

 sogorgia which he had established upon the Gorgonia can- 

 cellata Dana {Antipathes flabellum Esjoer). 



This coral has the smooth axis and general appearance of Antipa- 

 thes, to which it has been referred by most authors ; but from an exam- 

 ination of the external crust preserved upon some specimens collected 

 at Florida by an expedition from Williams College a few years since, 

 and now belonging to the Lyceum of Natural History of that Institu- 

 tion, he had been able to establish its affinities to the Gorgonidce. 



The principal character separating the ordei-s Alcyonaria and Zo- 

 antharia, into which the class of Polyps Is divided, are the pinnated 

 tentacles of Alcyonaria, always eight in number, in contrast with the 

 simple cylindrical tentacles of Zoantharia which are nearly always in 

 multiples of six, though often amounting to several hundred ; but in 

 Antipathes, so far as yet known, there are but six. Dr. J. E. Gray 

 has, however, placed this genus among the Alcyonaria, because in a 

 dry specimen he had observed traces of eight tentacles ; but as several 

 genera of Alcyonaria are creeping and incrusting, and often cover 

 dead stalks of Antipathes, Gorgonias, etc., so as to appear like the 

 original polyps, it is not improbable that Dr. Gray has In this way 

 been misled.* Another character in which the two orders differ, and 



* Gorr/onia irichoatemma Dana, Zoiiph., p. 6G5, pi. 59, fig. 3, is an instance of 

 this. I have a.^certaine(l from an examination of the original specimen, that it 

 consists of an axis of an Antipathes incrusted by a halcyonoid polyp, which often 

 also extends in the form of a tube beyond the broken ends of the branches of the 

 axis. 



