THE 



HYDROIDA IN GENERAL 



PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE HYDROIDA.— DESIGN OF THE 

 PRESENT MONOGRAPH. 



Rooted in the transparent reservoirs wliicli the retiring tide has left behind it in the rocky 

 shore, or spreading over the fronds of the sea-weeds, or fringing the reef at low water with a 

 mimic vegetation, or brought up by the dredge of the naturalist and the lines of the fisherman 

 from the deeper regions of the sea, there may be obtained, on perhaps every coast and in every 

 latitude, certain singular organisms which repeat with such unerring fidelity the forms of the 

 vegetable kingdom that we can scarcely bring ourselves to believe that the hundred plant-like 

 shapes which root themselves in that marvellous sea-garden, and stretch forth their branches, and 

 unfold their buds, and spread abroad their starry flow-ers, have not the structure and the life as 

 well as the form and the habit of the plant. And yet they are no plants, these strange plant-like 

 dwellers in the sea, but genuine animals in all that constitutes the essence of animality. 



When Marsigli, more than a century and a half ago, fished up from the Mediterranean Sea 

 a piece of living coral, and for the first time in the history of science its branches were seen 

 clustered with starry polypes, he believed that he had before him a blossoming plant ; for in the 

 branching stem which he had plucked from the rock M-here it had been rooted, and in its living 

 bark and eight-petalled flowers he saw nothing but the evidence of vegetality, which surely proved 

 that the great botanists of the day — Ray and Tournfort, and Ca3salpinus, and Bauhin, and Lobel, 

 were right when they called corals plants, and assigned them to the Floivi rather than to the Fauna 

 of the sea. And so, also, the organisms with w^hich the present monograph is to be occupied are 

 no less plant-like than their relatives the corals, for they are rooted, and branch, and bud and 

 blossom like them. 



But more than this, the sea is filled with living and moving forms, floating bells of crystal, 

 whose beauty no description can convey, whose multitude no thought can estimate. Unlike those 



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