HISTORY OF ZOOPHYTOLOGY. 21 



he appears to have been puzzled what to make of zoophytes ; 

 they were certainly not sea-weeds, — and it were too humihating 

 to adopt a once rejected theory, — when happily the Systema 

 Naturae came to his aid, and he instantly adopted with zeal the 

 vegeto-animal fancy, because, he says, it illustrated in a wonder- 

 ful manner other things which were previously obscure and in- 

 comprehensible, and because it was in perfect keeping with the 

 doctrine which taught that animated beings were a series of links 

 constituting one long chain that could not be broken without 

 violation to the continuity of organization, — the different species 

 being so closely connected on this side and that, that neither 

 sense nor imagination can detect the line which separates one 

 from the other. It must be allowed that in Baster the doctrine 

 of Linnseus has found its best advocate. He tells us that in 

 zoophytes there are too many signs of a perfect vegetation to 

 permit us to believe that they can owe their origin to animal- 

 cules so minute as to require a microscope to see them, and the 

 great simplicity of whose organization altogether unfits them for 

 perfecting such works : and as from the law of continuity indi- 

 cated above it was reasonable to presume the existence of beings 

 in which the distinctions between animals and plants should meet 

 and amalgamate, so by a comparison of their definitions it may 

 be made obvious that these distinctions disappear in zoophytes. 

 A plant is an organized body without sense or spontaneous mo- 

 tion, adhering by means of a root to some foreign substance 

 whence it derives the material of its life and increase : an ani- 

 mal, on the contrary, is an organized body endowed with sen- 

 sation and perception, which can, of its own free will, make cer- 

 tain movements peculiar to itself. Like the plant, zoophytes 

 grow fixed by a root ; and yet at the same time they are ani- 

 mals, for they show when touched that they feel by some mo- 

 tion, and when they perceive food proper for them they seize 

 and devour it by the action of certain members. 



Having in this manner commended the theory to our favour, 

 and shown its reasonableness and consonance to nature, Baster 

 goes on to explain the manner in which he conceives his ex- 

 periments prove that the Sertulariadse or flexible corallines grow. 

 The ova or seeds of these zoophytes, he asserts, pullulate from 

 the body of the mother in the likeness of tender articulations 



