INTRODUCTION. 37 
Peyssonnel by becoming the hearty advocate of opinions 
which he had formerly sought to refute. Peyssonnel was 
still alive and no doubt would hear with much satisfaction 
the change which had taken place, and, encouraged by it, 
he sent in 1752, to the Royal Society of London, a treatise 
on coral and other marine productions, the result of his own 
observations for thirty years. At first it was favourably re- 
ceived, but unfortunately for Peyssonnel, Dr. Parsons, a 
naturalist of some reputation and of great influence in the 
Royal Society, undertook to refute the statements made by 
Peyssonnel ; and at a period when few of the members of the 
society had tested the matter by personal observation, the 
plausible blustering of Parsons seems for a time to have 
overborne the truth. He considered the animals in the 
corals as mere accidental settlers, totally inadequate to the 
_ great works ascribed to them. “ And indeed it would seem 
to me,” says Parsons, “much more difficult to conceive that 
so fine an arrangement of parts, such masses as these bodies 
consist of, and such regular ramifications in some, and such 
well-contrived organs to serve for vegetation in others, 
should be the operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like 
animals, rather than the work of more sure vegetation, 
which carries on the growth of the tallest and largest trees 
