On visiting Jamaica in 1844, while the captain and the other passengers of the ship, which was bound for Savanna-la-Mar, went up the harbour, to see Kingston, Gosse spent his time in examining the fauna and flora of the Palisadoes. It is true there was little of the luxuriance or beauty that we associate with tropical scenery here. It is a low land of sand nearly nine miles in length; but scarcely anywhere more than a few hundred yards in breadth, forming a natural breakwater that separates the broad lake-like harbour of Kingston from the Caribbean Sea. I found it barren enough; but it was all strange, and to feet which for nearly two months had not felt the firm earth, even a run along the beach was exhilarating. The graceful cocoanut palm sprang up in groups from the water’s edge, waving its feathery fronds over the rippling waters that dashed about its fibrous foot. Great bushes of prickly-pear and other _Cacti_ were growing on the low summit of the bank, covering large spaces of ground, with their impenetrable masses, presenting a formidable array of spines: as did also a species of _Acacia_ that grew in thickets and single trees. All along the line of high water lay heaps of seaweeds drying in the sun, among which was particularly abundant a species of _Padina_, closely resembling the pretty “Peacock’s tail” of our own shores, though less regularly beautiful. Sponges of various forms, and large Fan-corals with the gelatinous flesh dried on the horny skeleton, were also thrown up on the higher beach; and I found in some abundance, a _Coralline_, of a soft consistence, and of a bright grass green hue, each branch of which was terminated by a radiating tuft of slender filaments. Shells were very scarce on the sea beach; but on the harbour side many species were found in the crevices and pools of the low rocks, and just within the margin of the water. All were small, and few presented any facts worthy of being noticed: they were chiefly of the genera _Turbo_, _Phasianella_, _Planaxis_, _Buccinum_, _Vermetus_, and _Fusus_; the bivalves _Ostrea_, _Anomia_, _Spondylus_, _Avicula_, _Arca_, _Cardium_, _Venus_, and _Pholas_. Several specimens of a brilliant little _Choetodon_ were swimming and darting about the narrow, but deep pools; they were not more than an inch in length, marked with alternate bands of black and golden yellow. In the vertical position in which they swim, with the eye of the observer looking down upon them, they appear to bear the slender proportions of ordinary fishes; and it is only by accident as in turning, or on capturing one, that we detect the peculiar form, high and vertically flattened, of this curious genus.