424 HISTORY OF ZOOPHYTOLOGY. 



with reason considered animals. " Zoopliyta,'" he writes to 

 Ellis, "are constructed very differently, living by a mere 

 vegetable life, and are increased every year under their bark, 

 like trees, as appears from the annual rings in a section of the 

 trunk of a Gorgonia. They are therefore vegetables, with 

 flowers like small animals, which you have most beautifully 

 delineated. All submarine plants are nourished by pores, not 

 by roots, as we learn from Fuci. As zoophytes are, many of 

 them, covered with a stony coat, the Creator has been pleased 

 that they should receive nourishment by their naked flowers. 

 He has therefore furnished each with a pore, which we call a 

 mouth. All living beings enjoy some motion. The zoophytes 

 mostly live in the perfectly undisturbed abyss of the ocean. 

 They cannot therefore partake of that motion, which trees 

 and herbs receive from the agitation of the air. Hence the 

 Creator has granted them a nervous system, that they may 

 spontaneously move at pleasure. Their lower part becomes 

 hardened and dead, like the solid wood of a tree. The sur- 

 face, under the bark, is every year furnished with a new living 

 layer, as in the vegetable kingdom. Thus they grow and in- 

 crease ; and may even be truly called vegetables, as having 

 flowers, producing capsules, &c. Yet, as they are endowed 

 with sensation and voluntary motion, they must be called, as 

 they are, animals ; for animals differ from plants merely in 

 having a sentient nervous system, with voluntary motion ; nor 

 are there any other limits between the two. Those, therefore, 

 who esteem these animalcules to be distinct from their stalk, 

 in my opinion, founded on observation, deceive and are de- 

 ceived." * 



There was something in this hypothesis peculiarly captivat- 

 ing to an imaginative mind, and few poets have possessed a 

 richer fancy than Linnseus. He seems to have ever fondly 

 cherished the opinion, for in his curious Diary, in which he 

 has enumerated, with much complacency, all his works and 

 merits, it is mentioned as one of his principal recommendations 

 to the respect of posterity. " Linne," he says, " decided that 

 they (zoophytes) were between vegetables and animals : vege- 

 tables with respect to their stems, and animals with respect to 



• Lin. Corresp. vol. i. pp. 151, 152. 



