Mr. A. H. HassalPs Catalogue of Irish Zoophytes. 277 



and wonders are made manifest to the admiring gaze. In this 

 particular all natural productions differ from those of man and 

 art, in whose works a minute examination renders apparent 

 dejfects, rudeness and deformity. 



But little more than a century has elapsed since the true 

 nature of the productions about to occupy our attention w^as 

 first discovered : prior to that period various opinions were 

 entertained respecting them. By one class of persons, and 

 these were by far the most numerous, they were regarded as 

 the undoubted subjects of the vegetable kingdom, and were 

 so arranged and classified in the various systems of the most 

 learned botanists of that day. Nor is this to be wondered at, 

 when we consider the striking resemblances which these ob- 

 jects bear to vegetables, both in form and habits ; some of 

 them being eminently arborescent in their mode of growth, 

 and being fixed by roots, either imbedded in the sand, or at- 

 tached to rocks, stones and other substances, in the same 

 manner as sea-weed, and consequently being incapable of lo- 

 comotion, a character at that time considered essential to con- 

 stitute an animal, being possessed in common by all the ani^ 

 mals then known. 



By a second set of persons, at the head of whom stands the 

 name of the illustrious Linnaeus, all the horny and flexible 

 Zoophyta were considered to hold a station intermediate be- 

 tween the animal and vegetable kingdoms, partaking of the 

 nature of both. The Lithophy ta were, however, arranged by 

 him in the animal kingdom, on the supposition that lime was 

 always an animal product. " The animalcules of the Litho- 

 phyta, like the testaceous tribes,'^ he said, ^^ fabricated their 

 own calcareous polypidom, forming the whole mass into tubes, 

 each ending on the surface in pores or cells, where alone the 

 animal seems to dwell ; but the polypes of the proper Zoo- 

 phyta, so far from constructing their plant like polypidoms, 

 were, on the contrary, the productions or efflorescences of it; 

 just as the flowers do not make the herb or tree, but are the 

 results of the vegetative life proceeding to perfection. Polypes, 

 according to this fancy, bore the same relation to their poly- 

 pidom that flowers do to the trunks and branches of a tree ; 

 both grew by vegetation : but while the one evolved from the 

 extremities blossoms, which shrunk not under external irrita- 

 tion, and were therefore properly flowers, the other put forth 

 flowers, which, because they exhibited every sign of animality, 

 were therefore, with reason, considered animals.^^ In a letter 

 to Ellis he remarks, alluding to the Zoophytes, "they are, 

 therefore, vegetables, with flowers like small animals.^' In his 

 ' Diary' he further observes, that they are " vegetables with re- 



