198 CORALS 



Linnaeus wrote a note to the genus Corallina : " Corallina 

 ad regnum animale pertinere ex substantia earum calcarea 

 constat, cum omnem calccm animalium esse product um 

 vcrissimum sit." Ellis ^ himself was of the same opinion 

 but was rather more cautious in expressing it. " What and 

 where the link is that unites the animal and vegetable 

 kingdoms of Nature, no one has yet been able to trace out ; 

 but some of these corallines appear to come the nearest to it 

 of anything that has occurred to me in all my researches ; 

 but then the calcareous covering, though ever so thin, 

 shows us that they cannot be vegetables." Pallas ^ dissented 

 from this view^ and in his introduction to the Corallinae said 

 that the whole of this genus should be handed over to 

 the botanists. Whereupon Ellis replied in a long letter 

 to Linnaeus, which was published in the Philosophical 

 Transactions of the Royal Society in 1767, that they were 

 unquestionably animals. 



Lamarck (1816) included all the calcareous Algae in his 

 book on Animaux sans vcrtchres, but his most noteworthy 

 contribution to the subject was the introduction of the 

 word " Nullipores," which was accepted as a convenient 

 term for corals that did not show conspicuous pores. The 

 name was extended in its application in later years but 

 finally abandoned altogether when it became too vague 

 and indeterminate. 



Some time before the year 1819 Targione Tozzetti 

 recognised that the corals belonging to the genus Halimeda 

 were plants, for he included them in his unpublished " Cata- 

 logus vegetabilium marinorum." Phillipi (1837) and Unger 

 (1858) proved that the greater numbers of the so-called 

 Nullipores are Lithothamnia and therefore plants. And 

 finally, in 1877, Munier-Chalmas recognised that the last 

 remaining family, the Dactyloporidae (Dasycladiaceae), are 

 calcareous Algae. 



The study of calcareous Algae has revealed the fact that 

 marine plants belonging to widely separated groups of Algae 



1 John Ellis, Natural History of the Zoophytes, 1786, p. no. 



2 Elenchns Zoophytorum, p. 418: " Mihi vero totum hocce genus 

 Botanicis reliqucndum vidctur." 



