During Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys’s cruise in 1870, two specimens of a wonderful sponge belonging also to the Hexactinellidæ were dredged in 374 fathoms in rocky ground off Cape St. Vincent. The larger of these forms a complete vase of a very elegant form, nearly ninety centimetres in diameter at the top and about sixty in height. The sponge came up folded together, and had much the appearance of a piece of coarse, grayish-colored blanket. Near the mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar a number of species were taken in considerable quantity, belonging to a group which were at first confused with the Hexactinellidæ, on account of their frequently forming a similar and equally beautiful continuous network of silica, so as to assume the same resemblance to delicate lace when boiled in nitric acid. The Corallio-spongiæ differ, however, from the Hexactinellidæ in one very fundamental character. While in the latter the spicule is hexradiate, in the former it consists of a shaft with three diverging rays at one end. This group of sponges are as yet imperfectly known. They seem to pass into such forms as Geodia and Tethya; and the typical example with which we are most familiar is the genus Dactylocalyx, represented by the cup-shaped pumice-like masses which are thrown ashore from time to time on the West Indian Islands. Twelve species of stony corals were dredged in 1869. From their considerable size, the length and rigidity of their straggling rays, and their habit of clinging to fixed objects, the Echinodermata are not very readily taken by the dredge, but they fall an easy prey to the “hempen tangles.” It is possible that this circumstance may to a certain extent exaggerate their apparent abundance at great depths, but we have direct evidence in the actual numbers which are brought up that in some places they must be wonderfully numerous; and we frequently dredge sponges and corals actually covered with them in the attitudes in which they lived, nestling among their fibres and in the angles of their branches. I have counted seventy-three examples of Amphiura abyssicola, small and large, sticking to one Holtenia.