MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION ON PUFFIN ISLAND. 41 
one living on the spot as to the greatest amount of periodic 
exposure to air which the animal can stand, and also as 
to what its habits would be if kept continually immersed 
in water. 
So many lists of animals from Hilbre Island, and notes 
on habits and times of occurrence and other matters have 
now been collected, that the committee will soon be 
justified in drawing up from these materials a compre- 
hensive account of the fauna of this isolated mass of rock 
surrounded on all sides by sand banks. This list when made 
out will be of considerable scientific interest, for comparison 
with the notes on the fauna of the island thirty to forty 
years ago, as recorded by Price and Byerley, and with 
lists which may be drawn up by other naturalists in the 
future. There is no doubt that some animals are now 
found at Hilbre which were not there formerly, and I fear 
some of the rarer Nudibranchs, which the late Mr. Price 
discovered, and sent to Alder and Hancock for incor- 
poration in their well-known monograph, have now 
disappeared from the neighbourhood. 
The animals which were collected during 1885 were 
preserved and stored in the Zoological Laboratory of 
University College, Liverpool, until the end of the summer. 
They were then roughly arranged into groups, such as 
sponges, zoophytes, sea-anemones, worms, molluscs, &c., 
and sent to those members of the committee and other 
naturalists who had undertaken to work up and report 
upon the specimens. This laboratory work went on 
during the winter 1885-86, and in the spring of 1886 the 
committee published their first volume of Reports,* 
containing twenty-nine articles, written by twenty-one 
authors, and illustrated by ten plates and two maps of the 
district. These reports record the occurrence of 913 
* Fauna of Liverpool Bay, Report I. Longmans, 1886. 
