118 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 



of making public statements in opposition to the views 

 of some of the most distinguished of their body, seems 

 bitterly to have resented the treatment he met with. 

 For he sent all further communications to the Royal 

 Society of London, which never had, and it is to be 

 hoped never will have, anything of an academic con- 

 stitution ; and finally he took himself off to Guadaloupe, 

 and became lost to science altogether. 



Fifteen or sixteen years after the date of Peyssonel's 

 suppressed paper, the Abbe Trembley published his 

 wonderful researches upon the fresh-water Hydra, 

 Bernard de Jussieu and Guettard followed them up by 

 like inquiries upon the marine sea-anemones and coral- 

 lines ; Reaumur, convinced against his will of the entire 

 justice of Peyssonel's views, adopted them, and made 

 him a half-and-half apology in the preface to the next 

 published volume of the " Memoires pour servir a 1'His- 

 toire des Insectes;" and, from this time forth, Peys- 

 sonel's doctrine that corals are the work of animal 

 organisms has been part of the body of established 

 scientific truth. 



Peyssonel, in the extract from his memoir already 

 cited, compares the flower-like animal of the coral to a 

 " poulpe," which is the French form of the name " poly- 

 pus," "the many -footed," which the ancient 

 naturalists gave to the soft-bodied cuttlefishes, which, 

 like the coral animal, have eight arms, or tentacles, 

 disposed around a central mouth. Reaumur, admitting 

 the analogy indicated by Peyssonel, gave the name of 

 polypes, not only to the sea-anemone, the coral animal, 

 and the fresh-water Hydra, but to what are now known 

 as the Polyzoa, and he termed the skeleton which they 

 fabricate a " poly pier " or "polypidom." 



The progress of discovery, since Reaumur's time, 



