ON THE USE OF SOME WORDS 3 



and Brain corals of the Coral reefs cannot be left out. 

 All these things are undoubtedly members of the Animal 

 Kingdom and belong to the group of animals known as the 

 Coelenterata. 



Moreover, if I were on a Coral reef with a few friends 

 of good education but not of scientific tastes, and were to 

 show them a Nullipore, they would in all probability call 

 it a Coral, and I should regard myself as a pedant if I said, 

 " No, it is a coralline alga," and the same if I denied that 

 the pieces of Lithothamnion brought up in his trawl by the 

 fisherman in the English Channel were corals, because they 

 happen to be plants. To restrict the use of the word Coral 

 to organisms or the products of organisms that are animals 

 would be to change the meaning the word has acquired in 

 everyday language, and a fortiori to restrict the use of the 

 term to animals that belong to that subdivision of the 

 Animal Kingdom called the Coelenterata would also be most 

 undesirable and impracticable.^ 



Nevertheless, the word as it is used by men of science 

 and by the general public has some definite restrictions. 

 It is not used for anything except certain animals and plants 

 or the productions of animals and plants that live in sea- 

 water or have lived in sea-water in prehistoric times. It 

 is used principally for such animals and plants that produce 

 a solid skeletal (or more accurately shell) structure of calcium 

 carbonate which persists as such entire, after the death 

 of the living organisms that produced it. The corals are, 

 moreover, sedentary organisms, that is to say they are 

 either fixed to some other hard substance at the bottom 

 of the sea, or, if free, are incapable of moving about from 

 place to place. 



According to this definition, therefore, the things in- 

 cluded in the term Corals are the calcareous marine plants, 

 certain Foraminifera and Sponges, the Madreporarian corals, 

 certain Alcyonaria (such as the Precious coral) , and H3^drozoa, 

 and also some genera belonging to the Polyzoa and Annelida. 



^ Coral — A hard calcareous substance consisting of the continuous 

 skeleton secreted by many tribes of coelenterate polyps for their support 

 and habitation (Murray's New English Dictionarv). 



