BRITISH ZOOPHYTES. 7 



munication addressed this time to the Eoyal Society 

 in England, he recapitulated his researches of the 

 previous thirty years ; hut his views received no more 

 support in England, tha.n they had done in France. 

 Strange to say, we find them opposed in quarters 

 where we should least of all have expected, opposition. 

 Baker and Parsons were the two chief opponents of 

 Peysonnel, both of whom, from their knowledge of the 

 hydra and its structure and history, we should have 

 expected, like Reaumur, to have adopted the new creed. 

 Baker, however, was enamoured of what he called the 

 " vegetative " or dendritic forms assumed by many 

 salts on crystallization; and he declined to believe that 

 the stony corals and corallines were other than mineral 

 productions ; and as to the horny and pliant forms of 

 zoophytes, these he considered as vegetable in nature. 



Dr. Parsons was quite unable to approve of Pey- 

 sonneFs views, which he attacked in the Royal Society 

 in the June following the reading of Peysonnel's 

 paper. In his attack he declared his inability to 

 conceive " that so fine an arrangement of parts, such 

 regular ramifications, and such well-contrived organs 

 to serve for vegetation, should be the operations of 

 little, poor, jelly-like animals." He accordingly stoutly 

 opposed their animality, and insisted that their pro- 

 ductions were the work of " more sure vegetation 

 which carries on the growth of the tallest and largest 

 trees with the same natural ease and influence as the 

 minutest plant." 



Parsons had not learned the truth which scientific 

 men now recognize, that the weak and little thiugs of 

 the earth are the most powerful factors of its structure 

 and development, a lesson which zoophytology is 



