Some fossil corals from the elevated reefs of Curaçao, Arube and Bonaire BY T.+ Wayland Vaughan A. M., Assistant Geologist and Palaeontologist, U. S. Geological Survey. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. I in in it While was Europe the summer of 1897, was fortune Prof. K. Director of the my good to meet MARTIN, who that I Leyden Geological Museum, upon hearing was making a special study of West Indian fossil corals, offered to at the that kindly place my disposal specimens he had collected in the Dutch West Indies. Hon. CHAS. D. WALCOTT, Director of the United States Geological Survey, and write has permitted me to study this material a report upon it. The of to principal object my journey Europe during and the last International Geological Congress was to visit study collections bearing upon our American fossil corals. a discussed Type collections of good many of the species in this were and it is paper examined, my pleasant duty here to make acknowledgements for courtesies extended to in me at several museums. Dr. WILHELM WELTNER, Custos the Museum für Naturkunde at kind to Berlin, was very 1 2 SOME FOSSIL CORALS FKOM THE ELEVATED REEFS OF me, and enabled me to study all of EHRENBERG’S types from the West Indies. I also examined some of KLUNZINGER’S types. Prof. CAMERANO for stud- at Turin, gave me every facility such ying types of DUCHASSING and MICHELOTTI as are pre- The of Prof. EDMOND PERRIER served there. assistants per- mitted me to study a considerable amount of the material of MILNE-EDWARDS and HAIME in the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle at Paris. Dr. HENRY WOODWARD and Dr. GREGORY for the fossil corals in the gave me every facility studying British Museum of Natural History; and Prof. F. JEFFREY H. M. BERNARD BELL and Mr. gave me access to all of the recent corals that I desired to study in that institution. of the of London The officers Geological Society gave me all the assistance possible. I studied there most of the types of DUNCAN. The whole collections of the United States National Museum and of the U. S. Geological Survey have been un- at Besides these collections the restrictedly my disposal. whole material collected by Mr. R. T. HILL, during his of work in the West that collected many years Indies, by Dr. J. W. SPENCER, and the recent collections of the U. S. FISH COMMISSION, have been submitted to me for study. There- fore, putting all together, I probably have been able to examine and study larger bulks of West Indian recent and than student. I am fossil reef corals any other one indebted to Mr. ALEXANDER AGASSIZ and Mr. SAM'L HENSHAW for the loan of books from the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and to Dr. W. H. DALL and Dr. LEONARD STEJNEGER for the use of books in their private libraries. I have often con- sulted Dr. DALL, Dr. C. W. RICHMOND and Mr. G. S. MILLER, JR., concerning questions of nomenclature. In stating the synonymy of the species discussed, the references to articles published in the transactions of so- CURACAO, ARUBJE AND BONAIRE. 3 cieties the numbers of the volumes and are to page not to the page numbers of the separates. This is true of EHREN- BERG'S Beiträge zur Kenhtniss der Corallent hiere des Ttothen Meeres, in fhe Abhandlungen der Kgl. Akademie der Wissen- schaften zu Berlin, the articles of DUCHASSAING and MICHE- In these instances the actual title of the LOTTI, etc. paper is not in always mentioned. It may be found the appended bibliography. I have credited the article in Encyclopedic Metliodique on Zoo- phytes to LAMOUROUX ; it is usually credited to DESLONGCHAMRS. It seems to call attention here to the proper very great difficulty in delimiting the species of compound corals, and to the of extremely perplexing synonymy many of the Orbicella species; for instance acropora possesses ten specific synonyms. One of the first causes of trouble is that the older zoopliytologists took very little into account the pos- sibilities, and actual facts, of the variations of species. It is of where fea- especially true compound corals, so many tures of the corallum are due to the interaction of indi- and viduals, where also the colonies are sedentary are character of subjected to so many extraneous influences, bottom, depth and purity of water, strength and direction of that currents, wave action, etc., no two colonies or no two coralla, are exactly alike. Many species were founded on the most iusignificant differences. DANA, MIENE-EDWARDS and HAIME, DUCHASSAING and MICHELOTTI, DUNCAN and others have made too in this Some many species way. species have been erected because of insufficient material for com- Other have made because of parison. species been gross ignorance and carelessness. DUNCAN is the greatest sinner in this manner. The best work that has been done on these corals is thatof POURTAEKS. Nearly all of his work is excellent. Much of the confusion regarding the naming of the species ELEVATED OF 4 SOME FOSSIL CORALS FROM THE REEFS is due to the neglect by MILNE-EDWARDS and HAIME of the work done before them, and no one since them has taken the trouble to make a thorough study of the work of the pioneers in zoophytology-LINNIEUS, PALLAS, ESPER, OKEN, LA- MARCK, etc., but practically every one has accepted the and dictum of the great French authors as law gospel. in They were often arbitrary their use and manufacture of either names, through ignorance or because they consi- dered themselves sufficient authority for making any changes in nomenclature, or any misapplication of names, pass as valid. The is in and following paper a study synonymy to a certain degree in stratigraphic distribution. Only nineteen fossil but it is species are identified, hoped that the names of these and that the far species are fixed, synonymy so as given is correct. This be looked an from a paper may upon as excerpt The Post-Eocene Corals of the United States larger paper, „ of This will now in course preparation. larger paper treat of all the post-Eocene species in the United States, and the in as species found Florida, etc., are often not to from the West Indian be separated species, a com- plete revision of the whole West Indian post-Eocene faunas will be In that more data the structure necessary. paper on of the hard parts of the corals will be given. In Eocene my „ and Lower Oligocene Corals of the United States Monograph XXXIX of the U. S. Geological Survey, the microscopic structure of several West Indian species is described as of incident to the description other species. Another paper the United by myself, for States Fish Commission, now completed, contains plates of nearly all the corals collected in by the FISH COMMISSION Puerto Rican waters. To a certain it is a of this degree companion paper. CURASAO, ARUI3E AND BONAIRE. 5 PAST WORK ON THE WEST INDIAN REEF CORALS. 1 have this of the appended to paper a bibliography lite- rature bearing 011 West Indian and northern South Amer- ican stony corals and on the coral reefs of those regions. The literature on the subject is so scattered, and it has taken and such a long time so much work for me to get it together, that it has seemed to me that it might be of much use to students intending to undertake work on the subject, if the titles were brought together in a compact form. I shall esteem it a personal favor for any one to notify me of title that be omitted from the list of any may papers. Iii the I shall confine remarks the following notes my to paleontology of the reefs. Very little has been published on these fossils in spite of the enormous West Indian lite- rature. SCHOMBURGK in his History of Barbados, p. 562, gives an imperfect list of a few species. DÜCHASSAING has published a few notes and DUNCAN has mixed (see Bibliography), up, as GREGORY has pointed out, species from Miocene (or Oli- gocene) to Pleistocene or recent. There are other brief notes but the extensive is GREGORY only really paper one by „Contributions to the Geology and Physical Geography of the West Indies' 1' 1 '). As I able examine all of GREGORY'S it was to material, may he worth while to give a somewhat critical review of his treatment of the species. His specimens came from Barbados. Madracis decactis (Lyman). The genus should be Axhelia. Geol. Soc. PL 1) Quart. Jour. Loud., vol. LI, 1895, pp. 255—310, XI. GREGORY had previously furnished JUKES BROWNE and HARRISON a list of the Barbadan elevated reef corals. This list, which, excepting some typo- is in all essentials the the graphic errors, same as subsequent more detailed paper on the Geol. and Phys. Geog. of the West Indies, was published by them " in their Barbados Jour. Geol. Soc. Loud. vol. „ Geology of (Quart. XLVII, 1891, p. 226). 6 SOME FOSSIL CORALS FROM THE ELEVATED REEFS OF Lithophyllia lacera (Pallas). Lithophyllia cubensis (M.-Ed. & H.). I ana not sure that these two species are really distinct; however, I am sure that Antillia ponderosa Duncan (non- Milne-Edwards and and Haime) is a distinct species does not in the of L. cubensis. As Duncan belong synonymy wrongly identified the species with Milne-Edwards and Haime's Montlivaultia ponderosa, it has no name. Therefore I to call it Antillia makes propose gregorii, nom. nov. Gregory to no reference the work of Briiggemann on „A Revision of the Recent Mussacea" ').