10 HISTORY OF ZOOPHYTOLOGY. 



trines were everywhere received with doubts and suspicion, and 

 beyond the immediate sphere of the Parisian academy, excited 

 apparently so Httle interest, that no one was induced to enter 

 into a practical examination of them. Donati indeed shortly 

 after gave a minute and accurate description of the coral and its 

 polypes, and a somewhat less detailed one of the madrepores, 

 but his phraseology being botanical and his opinions unformed,* 

 his researches were of little immediate service to the cause of 

 the zoologists, and perhaps rather tended to support the errone- 

 ous hypothesis which they were combating.f 



Peyssonnel was still living, and it was impossible that this dis- 

 cussion should not interest him. Accordingly we find that in 1751, 

 he transmitted to the Royal Society of London a manuscript 

 treatise on coral and other marine productions, J of which Dr 

 Watson has given a review in the 47th volume of its Transac- 

 tions, pubhshed in 1753. The treatise was sent to the English 

 society, because " that in France some lovers of natural history 

 do attribute and even appropriate to themselves his labours and 

 his discoveries, of which they have had the communication ;" — 

 a charge probably directed against Reaumur, but which the con- 

 duct of that illustrious man, so far as appears, did not warrant. 

 The treatise contains upwards of 400 quarto pages, and is the 



Shortly after this, however, he made other observations which convinced 

 him of the animality of coral. He says—" I am now of opinion, that coral is 

 nothing else than a real animal, which has a very great number of heads. I consider 

 the polypes of coral as the heads of the animal. This animal has a bone rami- 

 fied in the shape of a shrub. This bone is covered with a kind of flesh, which 

 is the flesh of the animal. My observations have discovered to me several ana- 

 logies between the animals of kinds approaching to this. There are, for in- 

 stance, Keratophyta, which do not diff-er from coral, except in the bone, or part 

 that forms the prop of the animal. In the coral it is testaceous, and in the 

 Keratophyta it is horny. "—Phil. Trans. (1757) abridg. xi. p. 83. 



t New Discoveries relating to the History of Coral, by Dr Vitaliano Donati. 

 Translated from the French, by Tho. Stack, M. D. F. R. S. (Feb. 7, 1750.)— 

 Phil. Trans. Vol. xlvii. p. 95. Haller characterizes the original as " nobile opus, 

 ex proprio labcre natum."— Bib. Bot. ii. 400. 



f Traite du corail, contcnant les nouvellcs decouvertes, qu'on a fait sur le 

 corail, les pores, madrepores, scharras, litophitons, eponges, et autres corps et 

 productions, que la mer fom-nit, pour servir a I'histoire naturelle de la mer. 

 By the Sieur de Peyssonnel, M. D. Correspondent of the Royal Academy of 

 Sciences of Paris, of that of Montpelier, and of that of Belles Lettres at Mar- 

 seilles. This treatise was never published. 



