218 THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 
and multiplication. A coloured representation of this species is included in that 
Plate of the writer's book on the “Great Barrier Reef” illustrative of Queensland 
Béche-de-Mer, of which group it is a non-commercial type. A photograph of a 
cluster of over a dozen of these Roebuck Bay individuals, taken vertically through 
the water, with their tentacular crowns in several instances partly extended, is 
reproduced to a scale of one-third of their life size in the accompanying illustra- 
tion. A remarkably fine and possibly new representative of apparently the same 
genus Colochirus was obtained by the writer in King’s Sound, further north. Its 
extended length was as much as nine inches, its body colour pale lilac with bright 
vermilion acetabular ridges, 
and the expanded tentacles 
orange scarlet with yellow 
tips. 
Another somewhat 
abnormal example of colour 
development which affects 
the coast scenery of the 
foreshore of Entrance Point, 
Roebuck Bay, when visible 
at low spring tide, invites 
brief notice. The above tide 
conditions subsisting on the 
occasion of the writer’s first 
visit to the Port of Broome, 
his attention was arrested by 
the presence on the foreshore IG Baile Rent sEhota 
SOCIAL HOLOTHURIANS, Colochirus anceps, ROEBUCK BAY, WESTERN AUSTRALIA. 
of what, as viewed with ONE-THIRD NATURAL S178. 
glasses from the steamer’s deck, appeared to be masses of some solid form of coral 
of a bright scarlet hue. Among the innumerable species of Madreporide observed 
and collected by the writer on the reefs of the Northern and Eastern Australian 
sea-boards, no coral of such a tint had been met with. The earliest opportunity 
was consequently seized of repairing to this reef, in the anticipation of securing 
a notable scientific novelty. The goal arrived at, these great expectations were to 
some extent disappointed by the discovery that the masses were corals indeed, 
but that the conspicuous colouring was entirely adventitious, being derived from the 
