THE AUSTRALIAN GREAT BARRIER REEF. 125 



That list was compiled, it is worthy of remark, from the Thursday Island (Port Kennedy) 

 gaol books for a single year. Concerning the residuum of nationalities whose more retiring 

 dispositions precluded their registration in the public archives, history is silent. The material 

 progress of Thursday Island is assured by the fact that it has been determined to make it a 

 fortified station and military depot. The construction of the fort is in rapid progress. At the 

 time of the author's last visit to the island (1891), it had already advanced so far on the 

 path of luxury as to be the possessor of a hackney carriage. 



All of the islands of the Torres Strait group are more or less begirt with frino-ino- coral-reefs, 

 while innumerable independent reefs of every shape and size prove a bar to bee-line navio-ation 

 in the intervening channels. The characteristic aspects of the reefs skirting the shores of 

 Thursday Island, and of others in the immediate neighbourhood, are extensively illustrated in this 

 volume. Reference may be made to the Photo-mezzotype plates Nos. II., III., IV. b, XVIII., 

 XIX., and XX. a and b. An illustration of the most northerly Warrior reef is photo- 

 graphically represented by Plate XI. The more conspicuous features of those various reefs, 

 together with their coral products, is fully discussed in Chapter I. 



As a centre for collecting and investigating the corals and the other marine products of 

 Torres Strait, Thursday Island possesses incomparable advantages, and its special appropriateness 

 for the establishment of a tropical biological station will be found advocated on a later page. The 

 most considerable collection of corals representative of the Torres Strait area collected by the 

 author, and contributed to the National Natural History Museum, were obtained from the neigh- 

 bourhood of Thursday Island. The Warrior Island reefs, to the extreme north, also proved a 

 very productive collecting-ground, while on the opposite, or south, side of the Strait, the 

 Albany Pass, with the reefs around Adolphus and Albany Islands, were profitably explored. The 

 majority of the Mushroom corals, Fungias, and species of Stinging Anemone, Adinodendron sp., 

 illustrated in Plates XXII. to XXIV., were, as notified in the descriptive texts, obtained from 

 this neighbourhood. The reefs around the more remote Murray and Darnly Islands, situated 

 in the extreme north-east of the Barrier area, in the neighbourhood of Flinders' Entrance, yielded 

 a coral fauna closely akin to that of Thursday Island, the genus Euphyllia, illustrated by Chromo 

 plate IV., as at all the other stations explored in Torres Strait, being conspicuously represented. 

 Large flats of the Zostera-like sea-grass Posidonia australis, upon which the Dugong habitually 

 feeds, form a characteristic feature of the Murray Island foreshore. These Posidonia beds 

 abounded with the small banded sea-snake, apparently Clicrsydnis gramilattis, which is reported 

 to be highly venomous. The natives of the island give the snakes a wide berth ; but it is note- 

 worthy that the European pearl-shell divers handle them with impunity, and the author, while 

 ignorant of their evil reputation, has handled them without their attempting to bite. That they 

 possess poison fangs, which they are, fortunately, slow to use, is established. 



Both Murray and Darnly Islands, and also the small, more northern, islet of Bramble Bay, 



