JT. 8acille-Kent, Photo. 

 PEARLING LUGGERS IN BROOME CKEF.K, ROEBUCK BAY, WESTERN AUSTRALIA, p. 197. 



flflD 



CONSIDEKABLE space was devoted in the author's recent work, " The 

 Great Barrier Eeef of Australia," to the subject of the Pearls and Pearl- 

 shell fisheries of Queensland. It is not proposed in this Chapter to re- 

 traverse that ground, but to chronicle a few data of interest relating to cognate 

 subjects accumulated during the writer's later peregrinations in Western Australia. 



As a matter of fact, a higher interest, from a naturalist's point of view, attaches 

 itself to these fishing industries as pursued in this more recently exploited territory 

 on account of the circumstance that they have here to deal with two very distinct 

 varieties of pearl-oyster in place of being practically limited, as in Queensland, to a 

 single type. In Torres Straits, the Gulf of Carpentaria, and along the northern confines 

 of the Great Barrier Eeef, where the Queensland fisheries are exclusively prosecuted, 

 the shell sought after is the large essentially tropical species known technically by the 



