ECOLOGY OF THE MURRAY ISLAND CORAL REEF. 



By Alfred Goldsborough Mayer. 



INTRODUCTION.^ 



It is a pleasure to speak of the generous interest which the officers of the 

 Austrahan Commonwealth displayed in behalf of our expedition and without 

 which its aims could not have been achieved. In response to the request of 

 the president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Right Honor- 

 able Viscount Bryce, then British ambassador to the United States, provided 

 the director of the expedition with letters of introduction to their Excellencies 

 the Governors of the Commonwealth of Australia and of Queensland. 



Acting upon the advice of His Excellency Sir William Macgregor, 

 M. D., G. C. M. G., C. B., governor of Queensland, the chief secretary of 

 Queensland the Honorable D. Denham, and the chief under secretary the 

 Honorable P. J. McDermott, I. S. O., recommended us to W. M. Lee-Bryce, 

 esq., resident and magistrate at Thursday Island, who permitted us to make 

 use of the court house and the jail on Murray Island for laboratory purposes, 

 thus providing excellent quarters in which to conduct our biological studies. 



Moreover, His Excellency J. H. P. Murray, M. A., C. M. G., lieutenant 

 governor and chief judicial officer of Papua, in response to a letter of intro- 

 duction from Judge Allan W. Macnaughton, kindly invited us to be his guests 

 at Government House during the entire time of our visit to Port Moresby, 

 New Guinea, and placed at our service the government launch and whale-boat. 



To other friends our acknowledgments of aid and expressions of gratitude 

 are also due: To R. Etheridge, esq., curator of the Australian Museum, 

 Sydney; to Charles Hedley, esq., F. L. S., and to John Stewart Bruce, J. P., 

 honorary fellow of the Anthropological Society of London and government 

 teacher and magistrate of the Murray Islands, we are indebted for kind and 

 active interest in our behalf and for advice which was of much importance 

 in determining the success of the expedition. 



We were also most kindly entertained upon Darnley Island by 1 homas 

 Arnold Williams, esq., and on Badu Island by Rev. F. W. Walker, the repre- 

 sentative of a philanthropic association whose attempt to develop money- 

 making arts and trades among the natives and to provide a market for their 

 wares is of the highest interest, tending, as such efforts must, to develop in 

 the aborigines a sense of self-dependence and to stimulate in them that 

 ambition which is the key-note to the introduction of actual civilization 

 among an erstwhile savage race. _^__ 



>A narrative of the expedition was published in Popular Science Monthly vol 85. Sept. 1914; and an abstract 

 of the resuks of the ecological study of the reef appeared in Proceedings of the Nafonal Academy of Sciences. 

 vol. I, pp. 2it-2l4, 1915- 3 



