428 HISTORY OF ZOOPHYTOLOGY. 



existence, for every tyro knows well that the coat or skin of a 

 seed in no instance ever pushes forth radical fibres, or ever 

 exhibits any sign of vegetation ; it is a dead part, which is 

 cast off or corrupts, and exerts no further influence on vegeta- 

 tion than as a protection to the cotyledons and embryo which 

 it invests, so that, if it is true that the coat of the ova of zoo- 

 phytes is the source of their vegetative part, as Baster says, 

 that coat must be of a very different nature from the skin of 

 seeds. It would have been better to have compared the ovi- 

 form bodies of the zoophyte with the buds of the tree, and he 

 might have disported with this fancy to some effect, for there 

 are many analogical resemblances, and the inapplicability of 

 the illustration is not so very plain. Still it is inapplicable, 

 for buds grow from the absorption of water and inorganic 

 matter, which is diffused and assimilated by means of a certain 

 determinate organization, while the covering of zoophytes re- 

 ceives no increase except through the medium of its polypes ; 

 it has no sap-vessels, no spiral tubes, no cellular parenchyma, 

 no absorbent roots, no pores and spiracles on the surface, so 

 that all its material must be derived from an internal source ; 

 and to say that a body vegetates when the nutriment is re- 

 ceived and assimilated in a different manner, and by a different 

 structure from what it is in plants, and is productive in its as- 

 similation of opposite principles, is to use terms in so vague a 

 sense as would be intolerable in any science. 



Neither the authority of Linnaeus, nor the imperfect experi- 

 ments of Baster, had any effect on Ellis, who steadily opposed 

 this vegeto-animal doctrine, and whose superior knowledge 

 made it easy for him to detect and point out the erroneousness 

 of the observations on which it principally rested. In refer- 

 ence to the opinion itself, he wrote to Linnoeus, " Artful 

 people may puzzle the vulgar, and tell us that the more hairy 

 a man is, and the longer his nails grow, he is more of a vege- 

 table than a man who shaves his hair or cuts his nails ;* that 

 frogs bud like trees, when they are tadpoles; and caterpillars 

 blossom into butterflies. These are pretty rhapsodies for a 

 Bonnet. Though there are different manners of growth in 



* Bohadsch, in answer to those who believed that the Pennatulse were plants, uses 

 the same argument. De Anim. Mar. p. 123. This author, who wrote in 1761, was 

 a strenuous advocate for the unmixed animality of zoophytes. 



