INTRODUCTION, 37 



^eyssonnel by becoming the hearty advocate of opinions 

 which lie had formerly sought to refute. Peyssonnel was 

 still alive and no doubt would hear with much satisfaction 

 the change which had taken place, and, encouraged by it, 

 he sent in 1752, to the Eoyal Society of London, a treatise 

 on coral and other marine productions, the result of his own 

 observations for thirty years. At first it was favourably re- 

 ceived, but unfortunately for Peyssonnel, Dr. Parsons, a 

 naturalist of some reputation and of great influence in the 

 Eoyal Society, undertook to refute the statements made by 

 Peyssonnel ; and at a period when few of the members of the 

 society had tested the matter by personal observation, the 

 plausible blustering of Parsons seems for a time to have 

 overborne the truth. He considered the animals in the 

 corals as mere accidental settlers, totally inadequate to the 

 great works ascribed to them. " And indeed it would seem 

 to me," says Parsons, " much more difficult to conceive that 

 so fine an arrangement of parts, such masses as these bodies 

 consist of, and such regular ramifications in some, and such 

 well-contrived organs to serve for vegetation in others, 

 should be the operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like 

 animals, rather than the work of more sure vegetation, 

 which carries on the growth of the tallest and largest trees 



