24 L. HILLIS-COLINVAIJX 



presentation speech for the Royal Society's Copley Medal award to 

 Ellis the following year (Smith, 1819). 



Linnaeus accepted much of Ellis' position on the animal nature of 

 corallines, and in his own last edition of "Systema Naturae" (1766-1767) 

 wrote of calcareousness indicating animal origin : "Corallinas ad regnum 

 animale pertinere ex substantia earum calcarea constat, cum omnem 

 calcem animalium esse productum verissimum sit." That Linnaeus had 

 reservations, however, is shown by his keeping the corallines in his 

 rather ambiguous group "Zoophyta", which he defined as compound 

 animals bearing flowers, their vegetating stem passing by meta- 

 morphoses into a flowering animal. Included under Zoophyta in the 

 tenth edition (1758), as well as in the last (1767), was Halimeda opuntia{a,s 

 Corallina opuntia), the only ^aZimec^a species Linnaeus apparently knew. 



Other contemporary workers such as Baxter (1761) and Pallas 

 (1766) objected to this animal classification of the genus Corallina since 

 the actual polyps had not been observed, but Ellis' arguments were 

 sufficiently convincing that for the remainder of the century the genus 

 generally was placed among the animals. The practice was continued 

 into the nineteenth century with the work of naturalists such as 

 Lamarck (1813) and Lamouroux (1812, 1816), but the term "zoophyte" 

 was replaced with the preferred "polypier". More significantly, 

 Lamouroux subdivided the coralline group into a number of genera. 

 One of these was Halimedea (1812) or Halimeda (1816), to which he 

 transferred the five species delimited by Ellis. The generic name we now 

 use had been born. Another name, Sertolaria, with Imperato's Sertolara 

 as type specimen, actually had been proposed earlier by Boehmer 

 (see Ludwig, 1760), but the epithet Halimeda is the one that became 

 established and in 1956 this familiar name was conserved (Lanjouw et 

 al., 1956). That these organisms really were plants, however, still had 

 to be worked out. 



The first person in the nineteenth century recorded as definitely 

 placing Halimeda in the plant kingdom, but under the name HormisMS, 

 appears to have been Targioni-Tozzetti, whose unpublished manuscript 

 was cited by Bertolini (1819). Link (1834), Chauvin (1842) and Decaisne 

 (1842) also placed this genus in the plant kingdom, and by 1842 it was 

 generally accepted that Halimeda was a plant. 



B. Halimeda discoveries: the beginnings of critical taxonomy 



Voyages of exploration as well as travels of individuals interested in 

 living organisms in the eighteenth century yielded additional new 

 species which were described by Decaisne (1841, 1842), Krauss (1846), 



