SPONGES 83 
dinong sponges, and declares that females have the largest 
pipes, while the males not only have smaller pipes which 
stand more thickly together, but are also harder. 
It is rather singular, considering their method of 
growth, that sponges should have been regarded as animals 
by those early writers. 
After this, during about a thousand years, when the 
minds of men wetfe too much occupied in the rapid po- 
litical and theological changes which the world was under- 
going to pay much attention to science, such insignifi- 
cant things as sponges were entirely overlooked, and 
when with the renewal of science, natural history began to 
be studied anew, sponges were regarded in quite a differ- 
ent light. . 
Gerarde in his Herbal says, “ There is found growing 
upon the rockes neare vnto the sea, a certaine matter 
wrought together, of the fome or froth of the sea, which we 
call spunges.” 
Yet the idea of the animal nature of sponges was not 
