V.-RlMESVAEAM ISLAND. 



In January 1887 it was my privilege to accompany the 

 Secretary to Grovernraent, Public Works Department, and 

 the Presidency Port Officer, on a tour of inspection of light- 

 houses, from Mangalore on the west to Gopdlpur on the 

 east, which come within the jurisdiction of the Madras 

 Government. My knowledge of the littoral of the Madras 

 Presidency was, apart from Madras, at that time confined to 

 E,4mesvaram Island on which I had spent a few days in 

 1886, and the West Coast from Cochin to Trivandrum which 

 I had visited, with a view to making a collection of the fishes 

 of Malabar, soon after my arrival in India in 1885. The 

 tour of light-house inspection afforded me an excellent 

 opportunity, even though the halts at the light-house 

 stations were, as a rule, very short, of forming a general idea 

 as to the zoological capacity of the different parts of the 

 coast, and deciding, by a visit to the fish bazdrs and cursory 

 examination of ' specimens ' cast up on shore, which afford, in 

 some measure, an index to the still living and submerged 

 fauna of the neighbouring sea, what parts of the coast 

 were likely to afford the most profitable field for future 

 investigation. 



A casual non-scientific observer, walking along the sandy 

 surf-beaten beach at Madras, will probably notice nothing to 

 attract his attention except a number of coarse shells des- 

 tined for the manufacture of chimdm, an occasional flattened 

 jelly-fish, and swift-footed crabs [Ocypoda) which, on the 

 approach of man, scamper away, and disappear, like rabbits, 

 within their burrows. But, if the same observer walks along 

 the shore at Pdmban or Hare Island, Tuticorin, he cannot 

 help observing that it is strewn with broken fragments of 

 dead coral, among which branches of Madrepores are most 

 conspicuous, and sponges brought on shore by a recent tide, 

 or dried up above tide-mark. And, if he trusts'himself upon 

 the slimy corals which are exposed at low tide, and turns 

 them over so as to display their under- surface, he will find 

 hidden there a wealth of marine animals — crabs, boring 



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