244 THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 
the no-distant future some de, -ture will be made from the monotonous repetition of 
impossible floral inanities that are year after year foisted upon the public as the latest 
triumphs of inventive genius in the matter of wall papers, draperies, and cognate 
subjects ! 
Dame Nature teems with new suggestions in both form and colour that appeal 
most urgently for recognition at the hands of the decorative artist. Not the least 
noteworthy among these is her wealth of treasures yielded by the sea. As an initial 
notion in that direction, what a vista of original distinction and success is open to the 
artist who, turning his back upon the egregious conventionalities and bastard banalities 
of every flower that blooms, shall strike out a new path! Taking, say, a wall paper 
for his theme, a well-thought-out design might have the body of the subject represented 
by coral branches. There are a thousand or more varieties to choose from of every 
form and tint, and these might again be indefinitely diversified by the inclusion or 
otherwise of their living flowers. For the dado of such a paper what is more 
capable of lending itself to elegant and artistic uses than the Pentacrini or stalked 
Feather-stars, many of them with their tall, graceful and finely divided articulations 
singularly suggestive of peacock’s feathers? The frieze, again, by way of harmonious 
compliment to the dado, might be suitably composed of a cordon of Sea-stars. Here, 
in form as well as in colour, there is, both literally and metaphorically, a perfect galaxy 
of beauty to select from. Asteroids and Sun-stars of the first magnitude and flame- 
like lambency, down to Starlets, Asterine, scarcely half-an-inch in diameter, with 
every intermediate gradation, are, in point of fact, awaiting in the Sea-star firmament 
the epoch of their artistic recognition. 
Between the lines of the larger Asterina calcar figured in Chromo Plate VIII, 
three or four smaller forms have been intercallated which are conspicuous for 
their brilliant colouration and shape. The violet- tinted example, Figure” 9, 
occupying the centre of the plate quoted, is an antipodeal representative of the 
-familiar “ Bird’s foot” Sea-star, Palmipes membranaceus of the British seas. This 
specimen, with many others, was dredged up by the writer in the estuary of the 
Tamar river, North Tasmania. The majority of these individuals were coloured a 
dark dull crimson, but this and one or two other examples, evidently the aristocracy 
of their race, were clad, as delineated, in royal purple. Their rows of bright 
yellow acetabula, or sucking feet, which decorate and adorn their under surfaces, 
suggest the further simile of chains of gold. The specimen here figured repre- 
sents a half-grown individual, the adult ones measuring from three to four inches 
