ON ZOOPHYTES. 531 
the alcyone palmata, in the true coral, and in the antipathes. 
Thus the opinion of the botanists, who claimed all the corals, all 
the polyparia, as belonging to the vegetable kingdom, appeared 
to be confirmed, and the true nature of these beings was still 
unknown for'some time, although some chemists had made 
the observation that the principles which entered into their 
composition were much more animal than vegetable, and 
Marsigli himself had remarked that the flowers of the coral 
disappeared, when it was put into fresh water, or with- 
drawn from the water altogether. Accordingly, the moment 
was at hand when they should definitively pass into the 
kingdom to which they really belong, although, even in 1700, 
Tournefort published a memoir to distinguish marine from 
maritime plants, and in which he employs the manner in 
which he supposes the madrepores to grow, to establish his 
opinion on the germination and vegetation of stones. Reau- 
mur himself, in 1727, published a memoir to explain how 
stony bodies can vegetate, by supposing, that in the coral, for 
example, it was the bark alone which vegetated, and which 
formed a stem, by depositing the red grains with which it is 
filled. Rumph, who had occasion to examine a great number 
of living corals in the Indian Archipelago, where they are 
spread in profusion, having established a particular division 
for the zoophytes, was perhaps the first who demonstrated 
the animal nature of these pretended plants, in many species. 
But it was only in 1727, that Reaumur reported to the 
Academy of Sciences, the celebrated discovery made by 
Peysor nel, in the Mediterranean, of the animality of the 
lithophytes, proving that what Marsigli had described and 
figured as the flowers of coral, were real aggregated animals, 
altogether analogous. to the actinie, and by no means what he 
had himself described as the flowers of marine plants in the 
memoir just mentioned, and before; consequently, that we 
must regard the madrepores, millepores, and in general all 
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