On some Remarkable Calcisponges from the Eocene Strata of Victoria, Australia

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Abstract
About two years ago Mr. T. S. Hall, M.A., of the University of Melbourne, forwarded to me, for examination and description, some small specimens of calcisponges which he had collected in different localities in the southern part of the Colony of Victoria. The sponges were found together with numerous species of bivalve mollusca, brachiopoda, fragmentary polyzoa and echinoid-tests, in beds of loose materials, sandy, clayey, and calcareous, which have been regarded, mainly on the evidence of the mollusca, as of Eocene age. The sponges are all fairly perfect as regards outer form, but in the great majority the spicular structure had been much altered in the fossilization, though sufficient was preserved to lead to the belief that they were new species. In one specimen, however, which came from ‘Griffin's Farm’ on the lower reaches of the Moorabool River, north of Geelong, the structure both of the exterior and interior of the sponge was in so unusually favourable a state of preservation that even the smallest spicules could be isolated and examined, and the character of the skeletal mesh could be ascertained with as much precision as in recent sponges. The structural features of this specimen, as will be seen from the description, are distinct from those of any fossil caleisponge hitherto described; and it resembles, in the peculiar form of the skeletal spicules and the firmness with which they are welded together to form the mesh, the remarkable calcisponge Petrostroma Schulzei , described recently by Prof. L. Döderlein, from the Japanese

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