ZOOLOGY AND BOTANY, MICROSCOPY, ETC. 73 



from great depths, is still imperfect, and it seems probable that the 

 greater number brought up apparently from the greater depths really 

 swim in shallow water, and are only taken in during the " hauling-in " 

 of the net. But Prof. Haeckel considers that those Medusse which 

 have either adapted themselves by special modification of organization 

 to a deep-sea habit of life, or which give evidence by their primitive 

 structure of a remote phylogenetic origin, may with great probability 

 be regarded as permanent and characteristic inhabitants of the depths 

 of the sea ; and as such he regards fourteen out of the eighteen 

 described. With regard to the illustrations, the author states : — " It 

 is of course impossible, from the imperfect state of preservation of the 

 spirit specimens, to expect that they should be absolutely true to 

 nature. I rather considered it my duty here, as in those figures in 

 my ' System der Medusen,' which were drawn from spirit specimens, 

 to take advantage of my knowledge of the forms of the living Medusas 

 to reconstruct the most probable approximate image of the living 

 forms." 



* Challenger ' Corals.* — ^Mr. H. N. Moseley describes the 

 Hydroid, Alcyonarian, and Madreporian Corals obtained by the 

 ' Challenger.' The chief results embodied in the first and second 

 parts have already been published in the author's communications on 

 the Hydrocorallin83 and Helioporidfe, though they have been recast, 

 and contain both additions and alterations ; but the third part comes 

 as a fresh work, the preliminary catalogue of the deep-sea Madrepores 

 having been necessarily very imperfect. We have now extended de- 

 scriptions and figures of the entire series of species dredged during 

 the voyage with thirty-three species described for the first time. 



These deep-sea Madrepores would appear to be very widely dis- 

 tributed, some, as for example Batliyactis symmetrica, having a world- 

 wide range. At present the only genera which seem restricted in 

 range are StepJianophyltia and StepJianofrochus, which have as yet only 

 been obtained from the seas of the Malay Archipelago, and in com- 

 paratively shallow water, and the genus Leptopenus, which has been 

 dredged throughout all the great oceans, but only south of the equator. 

 The wide range of species in depth has now become a well-known fact, 

 though none the less interesting for that, the world-distributed species 

 above-mentioned ranging in depth from 70 to 2900 fathoms. The 

 occurrence of the genera as fossils in Secondary and Tertiary deposits 

 is also not without interest ; but the deep-sea forms are not to be 

 regarded as of greater geological antiquity than those found in 

 shallow water. 



Morphology of the Coral-Skeleton.t— G. v. Koch, after a brief 

 review of the opinions of previous writers, reminds us that the separate 

 polyp is always a more or less cylindrical tube, with a mouth at one 

 end; thence an internal tube passes into the cavity. Around the 



* Keports on the Scientific Eesults of the Voyage of H.M.S. ' Challenger ' 

 during the years 1873-6, vol. ii. (1881) 248 pp. and 32 pis. Cf. Nature, xxvii. 

 (1882) pp. 73-4. 



t Biol. Centralbl., ii. (1882) pp. 583-93. 



