166 Mr. A. H. HassaH's Catalogue of Irish Zoophytes. 



XXI. — Catalogue of Irish Zoophytes. By Arthur Hill 

 Hassall, Esq., M.R.C.S.L. With 3 Plates. 



te It is delightful to see by these miniature existences, small 

 almost to invisibility, and by their careful organization as 

 finely contrived as in the grandest creature, that greatness 

 and littleness make no difference to Him in His Creation or 

 in His Providence. They reveal to us that magnitude is nothing 

 in His sight ; that He is pleased to frame and to regard the 

 small and weak as benignly and as attentively as the mighty 

 and the massive. We are high and low, great and small, as 

 to each other, but not to Him." — Sharon Turner's Sacred 

 History. 



In no part of the animal kingdom is the truth of the above 

 remarks more pleasingly or more beautifully manifested than 

 in the present order ; in no other department do we meet with, 

 to an equal extent at least, the same diversity and elegance of 

 form so illustrative of the fertility of invention and beauty of 

 conception of the Divine Mind. The heart must be cold and 

 insensate indeed, that, on beholding these interesting " minims 

 of creation" is not tempted to exclaim with the Psalmist, "in 

 wisdom," beneficent, infinite wisdom, " hast thou made them 

 all." 



The whole of the zoophytes enumerated in the following 

 Catalogue, with two exceptions, were found in the bays of 

 Dublin and Killiney during the winter of 1838 and spring of 

 1839. The extent of coast embraced by these bays is about 

 sixteen miles, abounding more in marine productions than any 

 other known locality of similar dimensions. 



The distribution of zoophytes is often extremely local, in 

 many cases a species being restricted to one particular spot 

 of perhaps not more than half a mile or a mile in extent ; it 

 is, on this account, that I have given the habitat of each sepa- 

 rately. 



The law of the spiral development of similar parts, so evi- 

 dent in the vegetable kingdom, is here also very generally ma- 

 nifested both in the form of the polypes as well as in that of 

 the polypidoms — this is particularly remarkable in Antennu- 

 laria antennina, Thuiaria thuja, Campanularia verticellata, 

 and Vesicularia spinosa ; and traces of this arrangement may 

 be detected in some part or other of the structure of the ma- 

 jority of zoophytes. 



In this catalogue the term Zoophyte is used in the ex- 

 tended signification in which it was employed by Ellis, who 

 embraced in his work the Articulated Corallines and Sponges, 

 denying, however, the existence of polypes in the latter, and 



