102 MADREPORARIA. 



walls of the shallow lateral calicles. Septa 18-24 in number, very narrow, frequently fusing 

 near the centre, but without columella or pali. Traces of pali can be seen only in the lateral 

 calicles. The texture is loose and open and the stock light. The calicles can be traced deep 

 in the skeleton. 



Dr. Klunzinger found one large specimen of this coral 55 cm. across and 40 cm. high, and 

 when dried, of a brown colour. The growth-form, rounded tops, flat sides, loose open texture, 

 and the persistence of the calicles through the sections are all characters suggestive of the 

 expanding sheaf method of growth. In the illustration, given by Dr. Klunzinger, of a young 

 stock we can see the tendency to early mounting upwards, and the lamellate septa, both 

 essential for the production of this growth-form. The author may be right in claiming this to 

 be the same kind of coral as that represented in Savigny's figure, but Savigny's figures 

 hardly fit into the above description. The calicles are there shown large and shallow, and with 

 a central star arrangement of the septal skeleton, whereas in Dr. Klunzinger's specimen they 

 were mostly small. The interesting point is the discovery that so many of the Goniopores 

 of the Red Sea show the expanding sheaf method of growth. Is this due to close relation- 

 ship or to the influence of the environment ? 



The next form appears at first sight to be a very different coral, hardly belonging to this 

 genus, but it is capable of being arranged in serial order with this and the foregoing, thus 

 finding a definite place in the genus which it would be otherwise difficult to assign. 



77. Goniopora Red Sea (6) 4. (PI. VII. fig. 9 ; PI. XIII. fig. 11.) 



[Red Sea ; British Museum.] 



Probably nearly allied to " Rhodarcea gracilis," Milne-Edwards and Haime, Les Coralliaires, iii. (1860) 

 p. 184. 



Description. — Corallum rises by successive caps covering previous convex growths, and 

 always increasing in size. Whether owing to the accidental attachment of foreign organisms 

 or as a normal growth-process the successive layers gradually expanded laterally with free 

 edges so as to form a mushroom-shaped stock (PI. XIII. fig. 11). 



The calicles (fig. 9) are minute, 1 * 5 mm., flush with the surface, densely crowded as breaks 

 in an elegant open friable reticulum composed of smooth filaments of uniform thickness bent and 

 twisted at all angles and ending at the surface in knobs or flakes. The walls simple and 

 irregularly angular, membranous, but with such large oval fenestrations that they hardly 

 interfere with the transparency of the reticulum when looked at slantingly. Some 6-10 of the 

 septa are rows of long filaments bent upwards and sideways, the rest remain rudimentary 

 round the thin jagged margin of the wall ; no definite arrangement can be made out, except that 

 they frequently fuse together and the larger meet with an open axial reticulum hardly dense 

 enough to be differentiated into a columellar tangle, excepting in the lateral calicles. Pali rise 

 to the level of the wall as filaments bent up from the filamentous septa ; they carry up the 

 axial reticulum. 



