2 
sion belonged to the genera Solenosmilia, Lophohelia, Desmophyllum, and 
Caryophyllia. 
The Andaman Sea ought to be a good place for corals, but it has not yet 
been sufficiently explored: so far, we have only got six or seven species from 
it,—and but few specimens of those. 
Off the Coromandel coast, in the Bay of Bengal, at a depth of about 600 
fathoms, where the bottom-mud begins to harden to a stiflish clay, we have 
constantly found, in goodly number, Flabellum japonicum Moseley, Flabellum 
laciniatum Philippi, and Bathyactis ; but besides these only two other species, 
namely a Caryophyllia and a Rhizotrochus, have been dredged. 
§ II. THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF CERTAIN 
InpIAN DeExEp-SEa CORALS. 
Of the 25 species described in this paper 19 are believed to be peculiar 
to the depths of the seas of India, although three—or even four—of them have 
a most suggestive resemblance to certain fossil forms described and figured by 
Seguenza from the Sicilian Tertiaries. 
The remaining six species, which are not peculiar to India, are Caryo- 
phyllia communis, Acanthocyathus grayi, Flabellum laciniatum, Flabellum 
japonicum, Bathyactis symmetrica, and Cyathohelia axillaris. 
Of Acanthocyathus grayi I can find no other notice than that of its 
authors, Milne Edwards and Haime, who state that its habitat is unknown. 
Of the rest, Bathyactis symmetrica is known to have a world-wide distri- 
bution, and Flabellum japonicum and Cyathohelia axillaris are two of the 
many marine forms that are common to India and Japan. 
The remaining two — Caryophyllia communis and Flabellum laciniatum— 
may also be taken as furnishing instances of the wide range that a good many 
deep-sea forms are known to have. But as they are Atlantic species, and are 
also known as fossils from the Tertiary Deposits of Sicily and Calabria, I think 
it equally probable that they give confirmatory evidence of the former open 
sea connexion between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, by way of the Medi- 
terranean, that geologists believe to have existed in early Tertiary times. As 
this is a bold theory for such slender zoological evidence to support, I must 
take this opportunity of offering some further corroborative evidence, obtained 
by summarizing the knowledge acquired by the “ Investigator” of the fauna 
of the Indian Seas at the depths at and near which Flabellum laciniatum and 
Caryophyllia communis occur. 
Excluding the Foraminifera (of which there are about 280 species) the 
total number of named deep-sea Metazoa in the “ Investigator” collections is 
