Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 1.djvu/437

Rh as far as our present knowledge instructs us, to find any corals, except perhaps some of the celleporæ at great depths, and I am not aware of any previous instance of a Melitœa or a Madrepora at all resembling those here represented having been found except at a small depth, and in a warm climate; from which I had concluded that they required more of the solar light and warmth than they could obtain at the depth from which you took those specimens. Your Primnoa is, however, to me the most interesting among them. The genus Primnoa was first established by Lamouroux for the single species previously called Gorgonia lepadifera, which is that found in Norway above alluded to. Ehrenberg (in his "Corallenthiere des rothen Meeres") was the first to include in it other species, and he properly added to it the G. verticillaris: he describes also a third species under the name of P. flabellum, but I am not quite satisfied that this species is established. The locality given for P. verticillaris by Ellis and Solander, and by Marsigli, is the Mediterranean. I have good specimens of this species from the West Indies, where they were collected by the late Rev. Lansdown Guilding. I have met with no statement of the depth at which it grows, but have reason to believe that Mr. Guilding did not use means to obtain his specimens (of which I have many) at great depths, and Ellis and Solander would certainly have told us if they had known of their occurrence at a great depth.

"Primnoa lepadifera is found, I believe, only on the coast of Norway. I have specimens nearly two feet in height, which were presented to me by Sir Arthur de Capell Brooke, Bart, who collected them there in 1820. He received accounts of their growing to a much larger size. They are found at great depths, varying from 150 to 300 fathoms. At these depths they grow in company with a large branching Alcyonium of a red colour (A. arboreum), and it is in fishing with lines for the red fish that the specimens are obtained. This fish frequents the places where these corals grow, and the lines getting entangled with the