INTRODUCTION. 35 
century. Imperato, a Neapolitan, seems to have been the 
first to state, as the result of his own observation, that 
corals and madrepores were the work of living creatures 
who dwelt in them. What reception his publication met 
with from the naturalists of that day we have not been able 
to learn. Though this work was illustrated by figures, a 
second edition of it did not appear till seventy-one years 
afterwards (1672), when the author, I doubt not, had 
passed away from the land of the living. Even then it 
seems to have been little read, for when Peysonnel, more 
than half a century afterwards, communicated the same dis- 
coveries to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, they deemed 
it quite new to them, and they appear to have treated the 
discoverer with scorn as a fanciful dreamer, or as a presum- 
ing upstart, who wished to be wiser than his neighbours. 
There were several things that contributed to the unfa- 
vourable reception which Peyssonnel’s discoveries met with. 
Some time before, Count Marsigli, a scientific Italian, had 
written on the subject, and though he described the animals 
he had seen in the corals, he had represented them as the 
flowers of the corals. It was too venturesome for a young 
man but little known to enter the field against a learned 
Count, and with that modesty that generally accompanies 
