W. J. CAIRD. 



it quite new to them, and they appear to have treated the discoverer 

 with scorn as a fanciful dreamer or as a presuming upstart who wished 

 to be wiser than his neighbours. 



This treatment of Peysonnel was probably due to the fact that, 

 some time before this, Count Marsigli, an Italian, had written on the 

 subject, and, though he had described the animals he had seen in the 

 corals, he had represented them as the flowers of the corals. A wordy 

 warfare was carried on for a long time; but, in 1741, the tide fairly 

 turned in favour of Peysonnel's theory, chiefly owing to the research 

 work done by Trembley and Bernard de Jussieu. In 1752, Peysonnel 

 sent a treatise on coral and other marine productions, the result of his 

 own observations for thirty years, to the Royal Society of London. Dr 

 Parsons, a naturalist of some reputation and of great influence in the 

 Royal Society, undertook to refute the statements made. by Peysonnel, 

 and for a time seems to have carried all before him. Parsons considered 

 the animals in the corals as mere accidental settlers, totally inadequate 

 to carry out the great works ascribed to them. 



About the same time Henry Baker discharged his last arrow in 

 defence of the mineral theory. In using the microscope he had doubt- 

 less observed the beautiful and regular crystallizations which salts, 

 earths, and metals assume, and he stoutly argued that the seeming sea 

 plants were nothing more than crystallizations. 



But all the members of the Royal Society were not satisfied. John 

 Ellis, a London merchant, from seeing the polypes in some of our 

 British zoophytes caught a convincing glimpse of the true state of the 

 matter, and prosecuted the study with such ardent zeal that in 1755 he 

 published a work entitled : " A'n Essay towards a Natural History of 

 Corallines and other Marine productions of the same kind commonly 

 found on the coasts of Great Britain and Ireland." This was the 

 standard English text-book till about 1838. 



Though the doctrine taught by Ellis was the same that had been 

 maintained by Peysonnel, Trembley, and latterly by Reaumur, he so fully 

 illustrated that matter that he may be said to have established its truth, 

 effecting a revolution in the opinions of the generality of scientific men. 

 He showed in those zoophytes of a compound nature, that though a 

 single animal inhabited each cell, yet they were united " by a tender 

 thready line to the fleshy part that occupies the middle of the whole 

 coralline; that the polypes were organically connected with the cells, 

 and could not remove from them ; and that that which seemed a plant 



