730 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1908. 



which was published in 1753 and, conseqviently eight years subse- 

 quent to the description of the Oland journey, he expresses his doubts 

 as follows : 



The native [corals] that are thrown up annually on the seashore at our Belt 

 [the Baltic Sea], particularly at Gotland, I hare never seen fresh, so that I 

 may well doubt whether they are actually still with us or whether they, like 

 the brachiopoda, have long ago migrated to an unknown part of the world. 



In the Systema Naturae (1768), 3 Tubiporoe and 7 Madreporas 

 among the fossils are quoted as " deperclitcv,^'' and concerning these 

 the following statement is made : " Habitant in Mari Baltico, cum 

 quotannis ad Gotlandiam rejiciuntur, deperditi," an expression almost 

 identical with that used for the Orthoceratites. A part of the Got- 

 land corals are, however, not included among the fossils, but among 

 living animals, an uncertainty which has already been pointed out by 

 Lindstrom. This doubt becomes natural, however, in view of what 

 Linne says in the Museum Tessinianum about '"''Porpita^ Helmintho- 

 lithus zoophyti m,eduso^^ ' sea penny,' vomit of jelly fish," which he 

 states are of common occurrence in Gotland and Oland : 



The mother of this stone is like a small jelly fish and of exactly the same 

 shape. The animal was taken some years ago in the Sargasso Sea of the East 

 Indies and donated to the natural history collection at Upsala by M. Lager- 

 strom, councilor of commerce, so that both the animal and stone could be seen 

 there. Until quite recently it was believed that this stone was the gei'm of our 

 Gotland corals, called " rams' horns," or at least that they were a coalescence 

 of clay w^hich had got into the star of the coral and there become solidified, 

 and nobody could ever have believed that it would be necessary to look as far 

 as the Indies for their origin. 



I do not know to which animal Linne here refers, nor is it essential 

 to the question at issue. What is most important, however, is the fact 

 that he believed he had found one of the Gotland corals {Madrepora 

 simplex orbicularis plana, stella convexa^^Palmocyclus porjnta) in an 

 animal brought home from the East Indian seas. It is thus quite 

 natural that he should have thought that the same possibility might 

 apply to some of the others. His uncertainty in this matter, which 

 we have mentioned, may therefore rather be considered as a praise- 

 worthy caution in the face of the doubt as to which animals still 

 remained to be discovered in distant seas. 



In this connection might also be quoted what Linne says in tlie 

 Museum Tessinianum regarding the ammonites and brachiopoda. 

 About the former he says: 



The origin of all these is unknown because the shell of the animal has neither 

 been found in Europe nor seen in any of the collections, and therefore it is 

 generally accounted among those entirely extinct. There is no trace of these 

 creatures except where they had been impressed in the rock, and the only way 

 to ascertain the species of these 'Nautili is from the rocks. 



