.MALAY AWCHIPELAGO GONIOPORA. 67 



This coral is in the Cambridge University Museum. It is a large oval or fusiform mass, 

 25 cm. long and 14 cm. thick, on which the most recent of the living layers is a narrow 

 ridge, only 5 cm. wide and over 30 cm. long, running from end to end of the stock and bent 

 down at the ends (PL XII. fig. 7). 



The general characters are very like those of the Amboyna coral just described. In both 

 the thin walls tend to be finely reticular instead of being purely membranous, and the reti- 

 culum is of the same character in each ; the growth-form too is closely similar. The chief 

 differences are that in the deep calicles the large plate-like pali of the Amboyna specimen 

 are hardly developed at all, but in both the pali-rosette in the lateral calicles is very highly 

 developed — if anything, it is more conspicuous in this coral than in that from Amboyna. 



Both corals show a tendency in the lateral calicles and round the edges of the stock for 

 the septa (though very inconspicuous in the deep calicles) to overrun the walls, and in this 

 coral there is a remarkable patch upon an earlier growth in which the whole character of the 

 calicles is completely different. They are shown on PL IX. fig. 3 as open, shallow, with broad 

 mound-like walls, over which the ragged and wavy septa hi n from calicle to calicle, the columellas 

 tangle being without pali, ragged and nearly flush with the tops of the walls. 



This is another instance of the ease with which the calicles may be transformed, although 

 in this case I do not know of any representative of the genus with calicles exactly like those 

 shown on this patch. In this coral, therefore, we have not only the special calicles on the top, 

 but the lateral calicles showing the usual tendency to revert to the shallow thick-walled 

 primitive type, and these abnormal calicles, which may be due perhaps to the proximity of 

 other disturbing organisms. They show the primitive calicle modified in a way not so far 

 known in any existing Goniopora. 



3G. Goniopora Philippines (4) 1. (PL IV. fig. 9.) 

 [Zamboanga, coll. H.M.S. ' Challenger ' ; British Museum.] 

 Tichopora tenetta, Quelch, 'Challenger' Report, xvi. (1886) p. 189, pi. xi. figs. 1, la. 



Description.- — Corallum a smooth, erect, symmetrical knob, swelling evenly, with blunt 

 rounded top. Edges not free nor easily recognisable, as they thin away upon an epitheca 

 which follows the irregularities of the surface. 



Calicles gaping open, shallow, subcircular, 4-5 mm. in diameter. Walls irregular in thick- 

 ness up to 2 mm., forming low ridges of a loose open reticulum, with very irregular ragged 

 upper edges, in which both septal and synapticular elements can, as a rule, be traced. In the 

 wider portions of the intervening spaces between the calicles, the reticulum tends to surge up. 

 The twenty-four septa nearly uniformly developed, thick near the wall, but thinning away 

 towards the centre, with ragged upper edges and frosted sides. They run out just below the 

 margin, and all join the columella, but the typical formula is conspicuous to the naked eye, 

 the tertiaries being long, and the interseptal loculi clear and conspicuous. The columella is a 

 large, conspicuous, convex mass of loose filamentous reticulum, rising into delicate free 

 granulated ends, which only here and there show any disposition to form sex-radiate 

 groups. The columellar tangle is in sharp contrast with the symmetrical ring of dark slit- 

 like interseptal loculi and with the rather thick conspicuous septa. 



K 2 



