142 Bibliographical Notice. 



The interesting history of the discovery of the animahty of Zoo- 

 phytes is enlarged upon in a most Uvely and interesting manner at 

 p/l3o:— 



" Little more than a century has elapsed," says Professor Rymer 

 Jones, " since .... zoophytes were considered the undoubted sub- 

 jects of the vegetable kingdom The zoologist claimed none of 



them, if we except the Actinice, 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 less arborescent character than 

 the rest, 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 opposition to the botanical theory came from the mine- 

 ralogists, 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 or ag- 

 glutination of a submarine general compost of calcareous and argilla- 

 ceous materials, moulded into the figure of trees and mosses by the 

 action of the waves, by crystallization, by the incrustation of real fuci, 

 or by some imagined vegetative power in brute matter. 



" It was only somewhere about the year 1 730 that Peyssonnel, a 

 physician residing at INIarseilles, whose opportunities of observing 

 these organisms entitled him to give an opinion upon the subject, first 

 ventured to maintain, that what had previously been described as the 

 'blossoms' of the coral, were true animals ('insects,' he thought 

 proper to call them), analogous to the Actiniae or Sea-Anemones ; 

 that the coral was secreted in a fluid form by the inhabitant Actiniae, 

 and became afterwards fixed, hard, and changed to stone ; and that 

 all other stony plants, and even sponges, are the work of different 

 * insects' peculiar to each species of these marine productions, which 

 labour uniformly according to their nature, and as the Supreme Being 

 has ordered and determined. 



" .Tussieu, whose eyes had been opened to the real nature of the 

 zoophytic races by the arguments of Peyssonnel, although, truth to 

 say, he seems to have been convinced sorely against his will, at last 

 declared his complete faith in the aniraality of these creatures, and 

 his conviction that a numerous list of productions, hitherto unex- 

 amined, would be found to be of the same nature : in fact, he seems 

 to have revelled in the enjoyment of the prospect thus revealed before 

 him. ' All that we have said,' he thus concludes, ' of the polyps 

 of the sea is merely a sort of advertisement, which, however, cannot 

 fail to produce the effect which we promise ourselves from it • it will 

 dovibtless direct the curiosity of naturalists who reside by the sea to 

 animals so worthy of being better known. They will seek out dif- 

 ferent species ; they will delight to describe to us the varieties pre- 

 sented in their forms, whicli are never but remarkable ; they will 

 study the figure and disposition of the cells of various species, their 

 manner of growth and reproduction, and wherewithal they are nou- 

 rished ; they will place in a clear light everything that has reference 

 to the different polypidoms and their formation, so that a department 



