244 THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 



the no-distant future some departure will be made from the monotonous repetition of 

 impossible floral inanities that are year after year foisted upon the public as the latest 

 triumphs of inventive genius in the matter of wall papers, draperies, and cognate 

 subjects ! 



Dame Nature teems with new suggestions in both form and colour that appeal 

 most urgently for recognition at the hands of the decorative artist. Not the least 

 noteworthy among these is her wealth of treasures yielded by the sea. As an initial 

 notion in that direction, what a vista of original distinction and success is open to the 

 artist who, turning his back upon the egregious conventionalities and bastard banalities 

 of every flower that blooms, shall strike out a new path ! Taking, say, a wall paper 

 for his theme, a well-thought-out design might have the body of the subject represented 

 by coral branches. There are a thousand or more varieties to choose from of every 

 form and tint, and these might again be indefinitely diversified by the inclusion or 

 otherwise of their living flowers. For the dado of such a paper what is more 

 capable of lending itself to elegant and artistic uses than the Pentacrini or stalked 

 Feather-stars, many of them with their tall, graceful and finely divided articulations 

 singularly suggestive of peacock's feathers ? The frieze, again, by way of harmonious 

 compliment to the dado, might be suitably composed of a cordon of Sea-stars. Here, 

 in form as well as in colour, there is, both literally and metaphorically, a perfect galaxy 

 of beauty to select from. Asteroids and Sun-stars of the first magnitude and flame- 

 like lambency, down to Starlets, Asterinse, scarcely half-an-inch in diameter, with 

 every intermediate gradation, are, in point of fact, awaiting in the Sea-star firmament 

 the epoch of their artistic recognition. 



Between the lines of the larger Asterina calcar figured in Chromo Plate VIII., 

 three or four smaller forms have been intercalated which are conspicuous for 

 their brilliant colouration and shape. The violet - tinted example, Figure 9, 

 occupying the centre of the plate quoted, is an antipodeal representative of the 

 familiar " Bird's foot " Sea-star, Palmipes membranaceus of the British seas. This 

 specimen, with many others, was dredged up by the writer in the estuary of the 

 Tamar river, North Tasmania. The majority of these individuals were coloured a 

 dark dull crimson, but this and one or two other examples, evidently the aristocracy 

 of their race, were clad, as delineated, in royal purple. Their rows of bright 

 yellow acetabula, or sucking feet, which decorate and adorn their under surfaces, 

 suggest the further simile of chains of gold. The specimen here figured repre- 

 sents a half-grown individual, the adult ones measuring from three to four inches 



