14 INTRODUCTION TO ZOOLOGY. 



pated little complexity and less variety of organization. Yet 

 the workmanship of the Divine Artificer is sufficiently com- 

 plicated and marvellous in these outcasts, as they may be 

 termed, of the Animal Kingdom, to exhaust the utmost skill 

 and patience of the anatomist in unravelling their structure, 

 and the greatest acumen and judgment in the physiologist in 

 determining the functions and analogies of the structures so 

 discovered. What also is very remarkable, the gradations of 

 organisation that arc traceable in these internal parasites 

 reach extremes as remote, and connect them by links as 

 diversified, as in any of the other groups of Zoophyta, although 

 these play their parts in the open and diversified field of 

 Nature." 



CLASS ZOOPHYTA, OR POLYPES. 



"Here, too, were living flowers, 



Which, like a bud comparted, 



Their purple cups contracted; 



And now in open blossom spread, 



Stretched like green anthers many a seeking head. 



And arborets of jointed stone were there, 

 And plants of fibres, fine as silkworm's thread, 



Yea, beautiful as mermaid's golden hair 

 Upon the waves dispread. 

 Others that, like the broad banana growing, 

 Raised their long wrinkled leaves of purple hue, 

 Like streamers wide overflowing." SOUTHEY. 



THE animals belonging to this class were formerly regarded 

 as vegetables. They were afterwards considered to be partly 

 of an animal and partly of a vegetable nature, which idea is 

 still conveyed in the term Zoophyte, a word derived from the 

 Greek, and literally meaning " animal-plant." It is to the 

 labours of John Ellis, a London merchant, who devoted much 

 of his leisure to Natural History, and has shown that such 

 studies are not incompatible with commercial pursuits, that 

 science is indebted for the series of accurate observations 

 which, about a century ago,* established the true position of 

 these singular creatures as members of the animal kingdom. 

 In the two former classes, the Infusoria and the Entozoa, 



*1754, 1755. 



