ON ZOOPHYTES. jae 
generally adopted, perhaps without sufficient discrimination, 
to express the solid part, of whatsoever nature it might be, on 
which those little animals live, to which, with Jussieu, he 
gave the general denomination of polypi. This name he had 
given to those discovered by Trembley, because their tenta- 
cula or horns appeared to him to be analogous to the arms of 
the sea-animal which the ancients had named polypous. ‘Thus 
definitively returned into the animal kingdom an entire and 
an extremely numerous class of beings, which from the imti- 
mate nature of their union, had been so long considered as 
vegetables, and which, considered in part, had been re- 
cognized as animals approximating to the actiniz, and con- 
sequently entering into the grand division of the zoophytes. 
Notwithstanding all these circumstances which we have 
now detailed, and more which it might prove tedious to enu- 
merate, Linneus, who in the first editions of the Systema 
Nature, had imitated Ray, in placing the lithophytes, in the 
vegetable kingdom, still preserved some doubts. In a disser- 
tation on the corals of the Baltic, after enumerating succes- 
sively the objections to the opinions of those who have main- 
tained that these bodies were minerals, vegetables, or ani- 
mals, he professes that he considers it a difficult matter which 
opinion to choose. Some time after, however, he was con- 
vinced of the truth, and in the sixth edition of his immortal 
work, admitted them into the animal kingdom. 
Thus at this second period of the science, the zoophytes 
were definitively ranged in the animal kingdom, by systematic 
writers. But they were still very far from being grouped and 
united in a suitable manner, as we shall see in our examina- 
tion of the particular researches of some writers on the 
subject. 
One of the first works which tended to bring this science 
to perfection, was published by Vitali Donati, on the Adriatic 
