408 HISTORY OK ZOOPHYTOLOGY. 



Previously to that time zoophytes were considered the un- 

 doubted subjects of the vegetable kingdom, naturalists being 

 obviously led to this allocation of them by their arborescent 

 appearances, in which it were vain to trace any likeness to 

 any common animal forms, and by their permanent fixedness 

 to the objects from which they grow, for zoophytes are at- 

 tached by means of a disc or tubular fibres much in the same 

 way that marine plants are, while the capability of moving at 

 will from place to place was deemed to be the principal cha- 

 racter of distinction between the two classes of animated 

 beings. The zoologist claimed none of them, if we except 

 the Actiniae or animal-flowers, for his province and study, but 

 left them without dispute to botanical writers ; and if any of 

 these, in reference to a very few zoophytes of the least arbo- 

 rescent character, hazarded a whispered conjecture that they 

 were wrongly classed, it died away in the utterance, and 

 raised no echo to awaken further inquiry. The only opposi- 

 tion to the botanical theory came from the mineralogists, who 

 some of them questioned the vegetability of such of these 

 productions as were of a hard and stony nature, contending 

 that they were rather rocks or stones formed by the sediment 

 and agglutination of a submarine general compost of calcareous 

 and argillaceous materials, moulded into the figures of trees 

 and mosses by the motion of the waves, by crystallization, by 

 the incrustation of real fuci, or by some imagined vegetative 

 power in brute matter. But although not more perhaps less 

 repugnant to the outward sense than the opposite hypothesis, 

 yet the mineral theory seems at no time to have obtained very 

 general favour or credit ; and accordingly we find that, in the 

 works of Tournefort and Ray,* the leading naturalists of the 

 age immediately antecedent to the discoveries which led to the 

 modern doctrines, the zoophytes, whether calcareous and hard, 



* In his " Wisdom of God in the Creation," Ray has, however, reckoned the 

 LitJiophyta among " inanimate mixed bodies." Of these, he says, " some have a kind 

 of vegetation and resemblance of plants, as corals, pori, and fungites, which grow upon 

 the rocks like shrubs." p. 83, duod. Lond. 1826. His opinions on this point were 

 probably unsettled ; and certainly many naturalists believed that Ovid only expressed 

 the simple fact when he wrote 



" Sic et curalium, quo primum contigit auras 



" Tempore durescit ; mollis fuit herba sub undis." 



Metam. lib. xv. 



