34 GLAUCUS ; OR, 
the narrow path of true science, which leads (if I 
may be allowed to transfer our Lord’s great parable 
from moral to intellectual matters) to Life; to the 
living and permanent knowledge of living things 
and of the laws of their existence. Humbling, 
truly, to one who looks back to the summer of 
1754, when good Mr. Ellis, the wise and benevolent 
West Indian merchant, read before the Royal 
Society his paper proving the animal nature of 
corals, and followed it up the year after by that 
“Essay toward a Natural History of the Corallines, 
and other like Marine Productions of the British 
Coasts,” which forms the groundwork of all our 
knowledge on the subject to this day. The chapter 
in Dr. G. Johnston’s “ British Zoophytes,” p. 407, or 
the excellent little réswmé thereof in Dr. Lands- 
borough’s book on the same subject, is really a 
saddening one, as one sees how loth were, not 
merely dreamers like Marsigli or Bonnet, but 
sound-headed men like Pallas and Linné, to give up 
the old sense-bound fancy, that these corals were 
vegetables, and their polypes some sort of living 
