"According to the account I had from the Malay captain, the price of trepang in the Chinese markets was fifteen rupees, about thirty shillings the pekoul, or a hundred and twenty-five pounds. He estimated his cargo to be worth about a hundred and twenty pounds. The fishing had occupied him and his crew three months. From the earliest times this commerce has belonged exclusively to the Malay fishermen, and it will always be difficult for Europeans to compete with them. The Malay vessels are equipped on the most economical principle, and the men are wanting neither in sobriety, intelligence, or activity. [Illustration: Plate XI.--Synapta Duvernæa. (Quatrefages.)] "It was nearly four o'clock when the Malays finished their operations. In less than half an hour they had embarked their cargo; the tents were struck, and, together with the boilers, carried back to the boats, which were already preparing to set sail. At eight o'clock in the evening they hoisted sail and left the bay." Some idea may be formed of the extent and importance of the Holothuria fishing by the number of ships which it attracts in this part of the East. Captain King assures us that two hundred vessels annually leave Madagascar to fish for the _sea slug_, as it is sometimes called. Captain Flinders, being on the coast of Australia, learnt that a fleet of sixty vessels, having a hundred men on board, had left Madagascar two months previously in the same pursuit. Among the Holothurias, one particular genus, the _Synapta_, is distinguished from others of the family by the absence of the ambulacral feet, and by the fact of its uniting both sexes in one individual. This remarkable Echinoderm, _Synapta duvernæa_, is represented in PL. XI. M. Quatrefages, who discovered it in the Channel, gives the following description of it in his great work, "Le Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste." "Imagine," he says, "a cylinder of rose-coloured crystal, as much as eighteen inches long and more than an inch in diameter, traversed in all its length by five narrow ribbons of white silk, and its head surmounted by a living flower, whose twelve tentacles of purest white fall behind in a graceful curve. In the centre of these tissues, which rival in their delicacy the most refined products of the loom, imagine an intestine of the thinnest gauze gorged from one end to the other with coarse grains of granite, the rugged points and sharp edge of which are perfectly perceptible to the naked eye.