HISTORY OF RESEARCH. 5 



century by the Count de Marsigli/ Marsigli, however, regarded them as the flowers of the coral, 

 and saw in thera a proof of the vegetable nature of the supposed sca-pUuit which bore theni ; 

 and his discovery was at once received as a full confirmation of the views entertained by the 

 leading botanists of the time, who all regarded the corals as genuine members of the vegetable 

 kingdom. 



Jean Antoine Peysonelle, however, during a residence at Marseilles and on the Mediterra- 

 nean shores of Africa, and subsequently at Guadaloupe, applied himself to the study of living 

 corals and madrepores, and soon became convinced that the coral flowers of Marsigli were truly 

 animals closely allied to the Actuiia, or " TJrticce vtarina," as they were called l)y the naturalists 

 of that day. 



Peysonelle's views were communicated by Reaumur to the Academy of Sciences in 1727,' 

 where they were received with discredit, and even contempt, Reaumur himself, who Ijelieved in 

 the vegetable nature of coral, not even mentioning the name of the author whose communication 

 he undertook to present, so that Peysonelle's discovery remained almost unknown until 1742, 

 when he forwarded to the Royal Society of London a long memoir, which was published in 

 abstract in the ' Philosophical Transactions' of that year. 



The discoveries of Peysonelle, however, had arrested the attention of the celebrated botanist, 

 Bernard de Jussieu, and, with the view of verifying them, he determined to visit the sea-coast of 

 Normandy. Though the shores of Normandy afforded to Jussieu no true corals, he found there 

 the nearly allied Alcyonium, which enabled him to confirm the views of Peysonelle. He at the 

 same time convinced himself that the plant-like Flustras wei-e truly animals ; and, what has a 

 more direct importance in its bearing upon the present history, he observed the polypites of 

 Tuhularia indivim, and was thus enabled to refer this hydroid to the animal kingdom. The 

 results of de Jussieu's visit to Normandy were published in the ' Memoires de rAcadumie' for 

 1742,* where he gives a figure of Tahtdaria ind'msa, which in truthfulness and expression has 

 never since been surpassed. 



Reaumur, unable to resist the accumulated evidence of the animality of corals and hydroids, 

 now fully accepted the views of Peysonelle, which he had some years before scarcely deemed 

 worthy of a serious thought. 



At this time Linnaeus was carrying out those wonderful reforms in classification and nomen- 

 clature which were destined to exert an influence on the progress of natural history greater than 

 anything which had been effected since the days of Aristotle, and which mark out the eighteenth 

 century as the most significant in the history of the natural sciences. 



The discoveries of Peysonelle, of Jussieu, and of Trembley, however, had not yet brought 

 conviction to the great systematist, and in 1745 we find him, in a dissertation on the fossil 

 corals of Sweden,^ after contrasting the various opinions regarding the nature of coral in accord- 

 ance with which it was assigned either to the mineral, the vegetable, or the animal kingdom, 

 candidly confessing that he was unable to decide between these rival views. 



^ See Luigi Ferd. Marsigli, ' Histoire physique de la Mer.' Amsterdam, 1725. Translated, 

 under the care of Boerhaave, from the original Italian edition of 1711. 



" Bernard de Jussieu, " Exameu de quelques productions Marines qui out ete mises au nombre des 

 plantes, et qui sout I'ouvrage d'une sortc d'Inscctes dc Mer;" 'Mem. de I'Acad. Roy. des Sciences,' 

 Paris, 1742, p. 392. 



* Carolus Linua3us, ' De Coralliis Balticis.' UpsaliK, 1745. 



