376 Mr. H. J. Carter on Sjiecimens 



There is, however, a large specimen (? 3 inches in its longest 

 diameter) in the Bower"bank collection now in the British 

 Museum labelled " coast of Suffolk, Dr. W. B. Clarke," in 

 which these conuli are turned into little round balls that, 

 touching each other, give the whole surface a granulated 

 appearance ; in short they are the conuli thus inflated, which, 

 again, are the circumferential terminations of the vertical fibre, 

 that in this species or variety (for which I would suggest 

 the name of Dysidea granulata) are more than ordinarily 

 enlarged. 



In my classification, this genus forms the type of the group 

 " Arenosa," which is the last of the family ^'Hircinida" in 

 my order " Psammonemata," and represents the opposite 

 state to that of the group " Euspongiosa," viz. the first of this 

 order, with respect to the amount of foreign material which 

 its fibre contains, inasmuch as, while there is hardly a trace 

 in the Euspongiosa (ex. gr. Sjyongia ojficitiah's), iheve is so much 

 in Dysidea that it is barely removed from sand itself. Thus 

 Dysidea bears to Spongia officinalis the same kind of relation 

 that some of the order Holorhaphidota, whose fibre is almost 

 entirely composed of spicules, bear to the kerataceous fibre of 

 some of the Rhaphidonemata, in which the spicules are fre- 

 quently very scanty. 



As regards geographical distribution, the very fact of the 

 genus Dysidea being the first step towards the development 

 of the Psammonemata, which may be said to culminate in 

 Spongia officinalis^ where the kerataceous element is almost 

 every thing, and the arenaceous one or that of foreign bodies 

 almost ^^^7, it might be fairly assumed that, if any part of the 

 order more than another is prevalent over the world, it will be 

 Dysidea^= Spongelia^ Nardo; at least, this is the case in the 

 British Isles, as may be seen by reference to Dr. Bowerbank's 

 ' British Spongiadaj ' (vol. iii. 1874), where, with the excep- 

 tion of a few insignificant specimens of his Spongionella jml- 

 chella (pi. Ixv. figs. 5-8) and Verongia zetlandica (pi. Ixx. 

 figs. 9-11), nothing but the representations of i)3/5^*c?f a ^/ra^iYis 

 is given. Yet the whole order appears to exist in the 

 greatest luxuriance on the south coast of Australia, especially 

 about the south-west angle, judging from the specimens 

 (skeletons for the most part) which have been picked up and 

 sent to England alone, of which the collections in the British 

 Museum (that is, including those which belonged to the late 

 Dr. Bowerbank) represent perhaps the finest and most varied 

 specimens of the greatest number of species brought together 

 in Europe. Among these are a vast number of specimens of 

 Dysidea Kirhii in all states, from crum bling fragility, owing 



