196 ANTHOZOA HELIANTHOIDA. 



proofs of its recent origin. It is inversely conical, pointed, subarcu- 

 ated, with a concave disc and a prominent centre ; the plates appear 

 to have been equal. It is about five-tenths of an inch in height, 

 and nearly the same in breadth across the star." Fleming. 



This description will scarcely enable us to identify the species. 

 Professor E. Forbes has no doubt that it is identical with Caryoph- 

 yllia Smithii, and he has sent me a specimen, dredged in the Zetland 

 seas, which seems to confirm his view. I give 

 Fig. 42. a figure of it. (No. 42.) The specimen is a 



dead one, and the lamellje are considerably 

 decayed, but it undoubtedly belongs to our 

 existing Caryophyllia, the turbinated shape 

 being the result of age, and produced by a 

 process of absorption yet little understood. 

 For it is now certain that the Turbinolise are 

 rooted in their first and early stages of ex- 

 istence, but, as age creeps upon them, the body 

 of the fleshy polype is raised higher by a deposition underneath it of 

 calcareous matter, and the basal portion of the coral, no longer re- 

 quired to contain the tenant, has its breadth diminished in propor- 

 tion to the other's gradual rise, until the attenuation at the lowest 

 point comes to be merely a weak neck, which easily breaks away, 

 and leaves the Zoophyte " detached," or at freedom. The most 

 singular fact is that the absorbent process should go on only in that 

 portion of the coral which has ceased to have any immediate con- 

 nection with the soft parts of the animal, and have in fact become, 

 as it were, extraneous to it ; and moreover, it proceeds from with- 

 out inwards. Attrition will not explain the result, but I have some- 

 times imagined that it might be the effect of the corrosion of the 

 acrid fluid that exudes from the skin and stomach of these creatures. 



2. T. MILLETIANA, wedge-shaped, compressed, grooved, with 

 twenty-four longitudinal smooth ribs. Mr. MacAndrew. 



PLATE XXXV. FIG. 13. 



Turbinolia milletiana, Lam. Anim. s. Vert. 2de edit. ii. 364. S. V. Wood in Ann. 

 and Mag. N. Hist. xiii. 12. Morris Cat. 46. 



Hdb. Dredged off Scilly, coast of Cornwall, by Mr. MacAndrew. 

 Dredged off the Isle of Arran, on the west coast of Ireland, Mr. 

 Barlee. 



Coral white, turbinate or wedge-shaped, somewhat compressed, 



