46 HISTORY OF BRITISH ZOOPHYTES. 
showed how suddenly the catastrophe had come upon the 
inhabitants, and that one skeleton was thought to be that 
of a slave arrested by death in the very act of stealing a 
bag of money from his master. What a lesson to us, to 
have our loins girt about and our lamps burning, and to 
be of them who are waiting and ‘watching, and ready for 
the coming of their Lord. | 
Though the doctrine taught by Ellis was the same that 
had been maintained by Peyssonnel, Trembiey, and latterly 
by Réaumur, he so fully illustrated that matter, that he 
may be said to have established its truth, effecting a revo- 
lution in the opinions of the generality of scientific men. 
He showed in those zoophytes of a compound nature, that 
though a single animal inhabited each cell, yet they were 
united, “by a tender thready line to the fleshy part that 
occupies the middle of the whole coralline;—that the 
polypes were organically connected with the cells, and could 
not remove from them;—and that that which seemed a 
plant, was the covering, whether horny or calcareous, of the 
hydra, and was as much an animal structure as the nails 
of a man, the horns of a bullock, or the shell of a tortoise.” 
It is not necessary that we should further trace the his- 
tory of Zoophytology; we may merely mention some of 
