244 MADREPORARIA. 
Notes oN MitNze-EpWARDS’ REFERENCES TO THE OCCURRENCE OF THE SPECIES 
P. conglomerata, P. lutea AND P. arenosa IN THE RED Ska. 
I would greatly prefer not having to pen the next few paragraphs. The more I work at 
the corals and realise the difficulty of the work, the more have I seen to admire in the classical 
work of Milne-Edwards and Haime. If now I have to point to a few cases of “ oversight” or 
“accidental mistake,” I do so without any disrespect to the learned authors, to whose pioneer 
work we owe so much, and simply because it comes right in the path of this volume. Even 
then, however, it might have been possible to slur them over in some way, but my attempt to 
find a scientific method of dealing with the facts compels me to point out how a bad system 
must almost necessarily lead the greatest of men into lapses from strict accuracy. There is 
something heroic in absolute intellectual honesty at all times, and even under the best of 
systems it is hardly to be expected. All the more urgent is it to have a system which 
shall not positively invite us to leave the solid facts and start guessing at the genetic affinities 
within a group like the corals. I have no hesitation in saying that all the so-called established 
species are purely fanciful. I only regret that the lapses which I have now to mention were 
made by the greatest of the pioneers in coral morphology. 
Under the name P. conglomerata Milne-Edwards (Les Cor. iii. p. 177) describes a form 
from the Red Sea, I failed to find the original of this in the Paris Museum. He refers, in his 
synonymy of the form, both to Esper’s MZ. conglomerata (Suppl. i. pl. 59 A), and to Lamarck’s 
Porites conglomerata, but this latter had reference only to Esper’s fig. 59 A. Lamarck does not 
appear to have had any specimen. If he had had, considering that his var. 1 and var. 2 are still 
preserved, we should expect to have found it. It is then difficult to ascertain what Milne- 
Edwards was describing, and where he obtained his details. For such details as he gives are 
not to be found in Esper’s figure or text. A possible solution may be found in the facts (1) that 
in his earlier paper on the Poritide in the Ann. Sci. Nat. 1851, he, in conjunction with 
Haime, gave Lamarck’s P. astra@oides as one of the synonyms of Esper’s coral. Now Lamarck’s 
P. astreoides is still preserved in the Paris Museum, and it was this that they described, adding, 
partly on the authority of Ehrenberg, that the species conglomerata occurred in the Red Sea; 
but (2) in 1860, Milne-Edwards admitted astrwoides and conglomerata as two distinct species, 
and consequently removed the specimen of the former he had described as conglomerata, and 
put it under astreoides, but he left its deseription still as the description of conglomerata. 
There is thus a detailed description of a Red Sea form which has never had any existence, 
the printed description having been borrowed from a West Indian form. 
I should certainly have concluded that there was some mistake in this charge had not the 
following cases been equally confusing. 
In 1851, Milne-Edwards and Haime gave a description of the species Porites lutea. It 
occurred at Tongatabu, and according to Dana at Fiji. There is still a specimen of Quoy and 
Gaimard, “ Porites conglomerata” (Tongatabu), labelled P. dutea, but this is not the one described 
by Milne-Edwards and Haime, for it has calicles only 0°75 mm. in diameter, while in the said 
description the calicles are given as 1 to 1-5 mm. in diameter. As this happens to be about 
the size of the calicles of Dana’s Porites conglomerata, we are left to conclude that Milne- 
Edwards and Haime’s description was founded upon Dana’s work. Here there were apparently 
iwo quite distinct corals drawn in under one name. But that was not enough. In 1860, 
Milne-Edwards, leaving the description unaltered, included certain Porites from the Red Sea, 
