5158 THE ZooLoctst—NovEMBER, 1876, 
locality, fifty miles in the interior. The greater number of these chert 
specimens found on the coast are, with the rest of the collection, in the 
British Museum. There is another circumstance which incidentally supports 
the view that while the moas still existed in great numbers the country was 
open and regularly traversed by the natives engaged in hunting. Near the 
old Maori ovens on the coast, Mantell discovered a very curious dish made 
of steatite, a mineral occurring in New Zealand on the west coast, rudely 
carved on the back in the Maori fashion, measuring twelve by eight inches, 
and very shallow. The natives at the time recognised this dish by tradition, 
and said there were two of them. It is very remarkable that, since then, 
the fellow-dish has been discovered by some gold-diggers in the Manuherikia 
Plain, and was used on an hotel counter at the Dunstan Township as a 
match-box, till it was sent to England, and, I am informed, placed ina 
public Museum in Liverpool.” 
(To be continued.) 
La Girelle (Coris Julis, Giinther) at the Crystal Palace Aquarium. 
By E. Howarp BrircHaLt, Esq. 
Two specimens of this lovely little fish—the rainbow wrasse 
of Yarrell, Couch, and Donovan—have recently arrived here from 
Naples. The species has had a place in the British list, on 
the authority of Donovan, since 1802, when a specimen was 
taken by trawlers in Mount’s Bay, and luckily brought ashore. 
As its capture has not since been recorded, its appearance on the 
Cornish coast may have been exceptional; but as the custom of 
trawlers is, after every haul, to pitch everything overboard which 
they do not consider marketable at Billingsgate, perhaps the 
exception may consist in the fact of their having brought one to 
land,.and not in its capture. It is common in the Mediterranean, 
and is found in the neighbouring parts of the Atlantic, as far west 
as the Canaries, while its extreme northern range would appear to 
be our own southern shores. 
The old naturalists all speak of it as common in the Mediter- 
ranean, though they differ in their accounts of its habits. Many 
of them give it a bad name for ferocious and poisonous qualities ; 
and Rondelet states, in confirmation, that he has been attacked 
and bitten on his legs by shoals of them when bathing. 
The naturalists of by-gone centuries seem to have had a 
mania for discovering venomous and other disagreeable qualities 
