Biographical Memoir of Peter Simon Pdilas. 215 



productions of nature ; and the taste for natural history, for 

 which the mother of the last stadtholder was so much distin- 

 guished, gave d new impulse to its study. 



With the decided predilection which Pallas brought with him 

 into such a country, it was impossible that his ardour for that 

 science should not be increased. A voyage to England still far- 

 ther strengthened and increased it, and, having formed the reso- 

 lution of making it henceforth the occupation of his life, he so- 

 licited his father''s permission to settle at the Hague. 



It was there thdt he published, in 1766, Elenchus Zoopliyto^ 

 rum, or table of zoophytes, the first of his great works. Five-and- 

 twenty years before this time, corals had been generally considered 

 as plants ; and the discovery which Peyssonnel made of their ani- 

 mal nature appeared to Reaumur so paradoxical, that, in publicly 

 mentioning it, he did not venture to name its author. But, shortly 

 afterwards, the more astonishing discoveries of Trembley, regard- 

 ing the divisibility of the polypus, and the detailed observations 

 of Bernard de Jussieu and Ellis, on the corallines of our shores, 

 dispelled every doubt on the subject. With the consent of all' 

 naturalists, an entire order of organised beings passed from one 

 kingdom to another : Linnaeus inscribed them among the ani- 

 mals ; the young Pallas undertook to arrange them, and draw 

 VLp their catalogue. The Dutch collections furnished him with 

 a rich harvest of them, which he arranged with a rare degree of 

 sagacity. The preciseness of his descriptions, and the care with 

 which he referred the synonyms of other authors to his speciesf, 

 were very remarkable in an author of only twenty-five years of 

 age. His introduction was still more so. He rejected the old 

 division of natural objects into three kingdoms, and shewed that 

 plants have not marked classes like animals, insomuch that they 

 are only, so to speak, one of the classes of the great organic 

 kingdom, as quadrupeds, fishes, and insects seVerally are ; a 

 truth with which our botanists seem scarcely impressed at the 

 present day. In maintaining this approximation of the two 

 kingdoms, he did not, however, also adopt the single scale of be- 

 ings, which the genius of Bonnet had rendered so popular ; on 

 the contrary, he presented the tree of organisation as producing 

 a multitude of lateral branches, which it would be impossible to 

 arrange in linear continuity, without doing violence to nature. 



p2 



