6 MADREPORARIA. 



The following islands were visited : Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Martinique, Guadalupe, St. Bar- 

 tholomew, St. Eustatius, St. Christopher, and St. Cross. The corals were referred to as 

 "Lex animaux lamellifh-es." Lesueur's main object being to study the animals themselves, 

 Lamarck having merely described their dried coralla. 



Lesueur, according to the habit of thought at the time, doubtless expected to find some 

 one or other of the three " species " of Lamarck. At Guadalupe he found a thin, encrusting 

 form, creeping over the irregularities of the substratum, and thus with an irregular surface of 

 its own. Its beautiful yellow polyps made it appear like a field covered with little flowers. 

 This, he thought, was a specimen of Lamarck's P. astrceoides. Lamarck himself appears to 

 have referred to more than one specimen, and he said that his species formed " des larges 

 jdaques eneroiitantes." There are some large flat cakes in the Paris Museum called P. astrceoides^ 

 and some are doubtless those seen by Lamarck. Milne-Edwards and Haime * first suppressed 

 the species and merged it with the old massive P. eonglomerata of Esper, of the eastern region, 

 and further, their description seems to imply that the forms were all massive. There was thus 

 probably no real resemblance between Lesueur's astrceoides and Lamarck's (see below, p. 15 

 on the distinctions between the encrusting forms). Nevertheless, the imaginary " species " 

 received it, and but that Lesueur figured and described it, his observation would have been as 

 good as lost. He was even less fortiinate in discovering representatives of either of the two 

 branching " species." Branching forms he found, but had to regard them as new species, such 

 as divaricata, flabelliformis, recta. This last, which was from St. Bartholomew Island, ap- 

 parently grew in sand, and shot up straight and smooth so as to raise the living colony, always 

 confined strictly to the top, as fast as possible above that, to the soft bodies of the polyps' 

 dangerous element ; only high up above the sand did the coral attempt to branch. One other 

 form found at Nevis Island growing in this same medium, and showing the same general 

 characters, instead of branching, formed a cluster of round knobs at the tip. This last club-like 

 corallum proved a snare by suggesting a name, for he called it " Porites davaria," or the club- 

 shaped Porites, and then added " Lamarck," as if it must be the same species as Lamarck's 

 coral. Two more widely different forms could hardly be found ! 



Dana, in his " Zoophytes " (1846) described two new forms from Barbados ; one he 

 called " flexuosa," and the other he "identified" with Lamarck's furcata (Milne-Edwards and 

 Haime's figure of the original type of "furcata " not having been published at the time Dana 

 wrote). 



The first work on Porites by these last-named classical French naturalists * was in 1851. 

 It did not add much to our knowledge of the West Indian forms themselves. The effect even 

 of the excellent figures which they gave of some fragments of Lamarck's Porites furcata seems 

 to have been neutralised by the title of the Plate, " La Structure de la Porite." This title 

 appears to have diverted attention from it as the type of "furcata." Had it borne its true 

 title, the short, stout, round-topped stems shown as closely packed and fusing together, might 

 have saved authors from unanimously assuming that furcata could be distinguished from 

 • Monographie des Poritids, Ann. Sci. Nat., xvi. (1851) p. 20. 



