FIJI-NEW ZEALAND EXPEDITION 159 
orange, red, and gold slowly swims off with a strange undulatory 
motion ; from a broken rock unwinds a worm, at first a few inches, 
then a foot, two feet, then by the yard—collect what you want 
and leave the rest; a big shell walks off —it is simply a large, red, 
hairy hermit crab moving his house. At one place the writer 
turned over a flat coral head three or four feet in diameter. There 
was the usual scurrying to cover of crabs and fishes, but imagine 
the surprise when there rolled off of the up-turned stone two 
beautiful comatulid crinoids four to six inches across. Their arms 
and other appendages were most attractively barred with yellow, 
white, and dark bands. These rare animals were the high water 
mark of that day’s collecting. But the tide returned, ankle-deep, 
then knee-deep; our rapidly diminishing island and laboratory 
were a half mile away and the water to our arm pits before we 
got the collecting pails to land. 
This great tide flat with its teeming life is but the repetition of 
another flat which is now close to two hundred feet higher as ihe 
Tertiary limestones mentioned above testify. Streams have carved 
the old elevated platforms into deep valleys and sloping hills and 
its landward edge is many miles from the present shoreline. In- 
termediate diastrophic movements have somewhat complicated the 
story as the Suva soapstone and other evidences seem to imply. 
An opportunity to see the gorgeous living corals of the fringing 
reef and those of the deeper waters inside the barrier reef was 
had in a ride at high tide in the ‘‘ Alma S,’’ a staunch gasoline 
boat drawing about two feet of water, and piloted by her owner, 
Mr. Smoothey, a very efficient skipper. The run was from Suva 
to Navua at the mouth of a river of the same name. Wonderful 
reefs of immense purplish heads, some solid, some branching, 
flexible corals, sea-urchins and gaudy reef fishes abounded in the 
clear water. A species of medusa, individuals a foot across, 
purplish above with brownish tentacles below, was very common, 
some at the surface, others ten to twenty feet down. We passed 
through and over them for miles. The boat finally reached the 
Navua dock and none too soon for the tide was turning. 
This delightful trip was but an introduction to an eight-day 
excursion inland first by poling up the Navua and walking across 
the divide to the Waindina, then by boat down the Rewa and 
back to Suva. Elsewhere in the volume Doctor Wylie, the botanist 
of the party, has described this delightful trip into the heart of 
