218 



THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 



and multiplication. A coloured representation of this species is included in that 

 Plate of the writer's book on the "Great Barrier Reef" illustrative of Queensland 

 Bche-de-Mer, of which group it is a non -commercial type. A photograph of a 

 cluster of over a dozen of these Roebuck Bay individuals, taken vertically through 

 the water, with their tentacular crowns in several instances partly extended, is 

 reproduced to a scale of one-third of their life size in the accompanying illustra- 

 tion. A remarkably fine and possibly new representative of apparently the same 

 genus Colochirus was obtained by the writer in King's Sound, further north. Its 

 extended length was as much as nine inches, its body colour pale lilac with bright 

 vermilion acetabular ridges, 

 and the expanded tentacles 

 orange scarlet with yellow 

 tips. 



Another somewhat 

 abnormal example of colour 

 development which affects 

 the coast scenery of the 

 foreshore of Entrance Point, 

 Roebuck Bay, when visible 

 at low spring tide, invites 

 brief notice. The above tide 

 conditions subsisting on the 

 occasion of the writer's first 

 visit to the Port of Broome, 

 his attention was arrested by 

 the presence on the foreshore w - -H-A>, 



,. i . SOCIAL HOLOTHURIAN8, ColochirttS mlreps. ROEBUCK BAY, WESTERS AVSTIHI.IA 



OI What, as Viewed With ONE-THIRD NATURAL SIZE. 



glasses from the steamer's deck, appeared to be masses of some solid form of coral 

 of a bright scarlet hue. Among the innumerable species of Madreporidse observed 

 and collected by the writer on the reefs of the Northern and Eastern Australian 

 sea-boards, no coral of such a tint had been met with. The earliest opportunity 

 was consequently seized of repairing to this reef, in the anticipation of securing 

 a notable scientific novelty. The goal arrived at, these great expectations were to 

 some extent disappointed by the discovery that the masses were corals indeed, 

 but that the conspicuous colouring was entirely adventitious, being derived from the 



