HISTORY OF ZOOPHYTOLOGY. 23 



could blind him to the fallacy of the consequent reasoning. 

 The analogy attempted to be drawn between the eggs of zoo- 

 phytes and the seeds of plants has no existence, for every tyro 

 knows well that the coat or skin of a seed in no instance ever 

 pushes forth radical fibres, or ever exhibits any sign of vegeta- 

 tion ; — it is a dead part which is cast off or corrupts, and exerts 

 no further influence on vegetation tlian as a protection to the 

 cotyledons and embryo which it invests, so that if it is true that 

 the coat of the ova of zoophytes is the source of their vegetative 

 part, as Baster says, that coat must be of a very different na- 

 ture from the skin of seeds. It would have been better to have 

 compared the oviform bodies of the zoophyte with the buds of 

 the tree, and he might have disported with this fancy to some 

 effect, for there are many analogical resemblances, and the in- 

 applicability of the illustration is not so very plain. Still it is 

 inapplicable, for buds grow from the absorption of water and in- 

 organic matter which is diffused and assimilated by means of a 

 certain determinate organization, while the covering of zoophy- 

 tes receives no increase except through the medium of its poly- 

 pes; — it has no sap-vessels, no spiral tubes, no cellular paren- 

 chyma^ no absorbent roots, no pores and spiracles on the sur- 

 face, so that all its material must be derived from an internal 

 source ; and to say that a body vegetates when the nutriment is 

 received and assimilated in a different manner, and by a differ- 

 ent structure from what it is in plants, and is productive in its 

 assimilation of opposite principles, is to use terms in so vague a 

 sense as would be intolerable in any science. 



Neither the authority of Linnaeus, nor the imperfect experi- 

 ments of Baster, had any effect on Ellis, who steadily opposed 

 this vegeto-animal doctrine, and whose superior knowledge made 

 it easy for him to detect and point out the erroneousness of the 

 observations on which it principally rested. In reference to the 

 opinion itself he wrote to Linnaeus, — " artful people may puzzle 

 the vulgar, and tell us that the more hairy a man is, and the 

 longer his nails grow, he is more of a vegetable than a man who 

 shaves his hair or cuts his nails ;* that frogs bud like trees, 



* Boliadsfh in answer to those who believed that the Pennatulae were plants 

 uses the same argument — De Anim. Mar. p. 123. This author, who wrote in 

 ] 761, was a strenuous advocate for the unmixed animality of zoophytes. 



