4 HISTORY OF ZOOPIIYTOLOGY. 



terance, and raised no echo to awaken further inquiry. The only 

 opposition to the botanical theory came from the mineralogists, 

 who some of them questioned the vegetability of such of these 

 productions as were of a hard and stony nature, contending 

 they were rather rocks or stones formed by the sediment and 

 agglutination of a submarine general compost of calcareous and 

 argillaceous materials, moulded into the figures of trees and 

 mosses by ,the motion of the waves, by crystallization, by the 

 incrustation of real fuci, or by some imagined vegetative power 

 in brute matter. But although not more — perhaps less repug- 

 nant to the outward sense than the opposite hypothesis, yet 

 the mineral theory seems at no time to have obtained very ge- 

 neral favour or credit ; and accordingly we find that, in the works 

 of Tournefort and Ray,* the leading naturalists of the age imme- 

 diately antecedent to the discoveries which led to the modern 

 doctrines, the zoophytes, whether calcareous and hard, or horny 

 and flexible, were arranged and described among sea-weeds and 

 mosses without any misgivings concerning the propriety of doing 

 so. 



Ferrante Imperato, an apothecary in Naples, was the first 

 naturalist, according to M. De Blainville, distinctly to publish, 

 as the result of his proper observations, the animality of corals 

 and madrepores,-|- and he is said to have accompanied the de- 



* III his " Wisdom of God in the Creation," Ray has, however, reckoned the 

 Lithnphijta among " inanimate mixed bodies." Of these, he says, " some have 

 a kind of vegetation and resemblance of plants, as corals, pori, and fungites, 

 Avhich grow upon the rocks like shrubs." — p. 83, duod. Lond. 182G. His opi- 

 nions on this point were probably unsettled ; and certainly many naturalists be- 

 lieved that Ovid only exj)ressed the simple fact when he wrote — 

 " Sic et curalium, quo primum contigit auras 

 " Tempore durescit ; mollis fuit herba sub undis." 



Metam. lib. xv. 



f Man. d'Actinol. p. \A Lamouroux on the contrary places Imperato on the 



same level with Gesner, Boccone, and Shaw — none of whom had any distinct 

 notion of the animality of any zoophytes, and had no doubt of the vegetable 

 nature of almost all of them. " Les observations de ces hommes celebres, au 

 lieu d'eclairer les naturalistes sur cette branche interessante de la science, em- 

 brouillaient encore plus son etude." — Lam. Cor. Flex. Introd. p. xiv. My 

 copy of Imperato's work is of the edition printed at Venice in 167'2, folio. It 

 is written entirely in Italian, and, being ignorant of that language, I can give no 

 opinion of the value of its letter-press. The only copper-jjlate is a very curious 

 one representing the interior of Imperato's museum, which appears to have been 

 a very elegant and copious collection of curiosities, a servant pointing with a 



