ZOOPHYTES. G9 



fruitful corpuscles, as in the Mosses, which seem to be invested -with 

 some of the characteristics of animal life, for they appear to be gifted 

 with organs of locomotion, namely, vibratile cilia, by means of which 

 they execute movements which are to all appearance quite voluntary. 

 Side by side with these are vegetable germs and fecundating corpuscles, 

 known as antherozoides among the Algae, Mosses, and Ferns, which, 

 when floating in water, go and come like the inferior animals, seeking 

 to penetrate into cavities, withdrawing themselves, returning again, 

 and again introducing themselves, and exhibiting all the signs of an 

 apparent effort. Let us compare the Infusoria, or even the Polypi 

 and Gorgons, with these shifting vegetable organisms, and say 

 if it is easy to determine, without considerable study, which is 

 the plant and which the animal. The precise line of demarcation 

 which it is so desirable to establish between the two kingdoms of 

 Nature is indeed difficult to trace. 



The word zoophyte, to which this comparison introduces us, seems 

 very happily applied : it is derived from the Greek word f<5W, 

 animal, and (frvrov, plant ; and is, as it seems to us, quite worthy 

 of being retained in Science, because it consecrates and materialises, 

 so to speak, a sort of fusion between the two kingdoms of Nature 

 at their confines. Let us guard ourselves, however, from carrying 

 this idea too far, and, upon the faith of a happy word, altering alto- 

 gether the true relations of created beings. In adopting the name 

 zoophyte, to indicate a great division of the animal kingdom, the 

 reader must not imagine that there is any ambiguity about the 

 creatures designated, or that they belong at once to both kingdoms, 

 or that they might be ranged indifferently in the one or the other. 

 Zoophytes are animals, and nothing but animals ; the justification for 

 using a designation which signifies animal-plant is, that many of them 

 have an exterior resemblance to plants ; that they divide themselves 

 by offshoots, as some plants do, and are sometimes crowned with 

 organs tinted with lively colours, like some flowers. 



This analogy between plants and zoophytes is nowhere more appa- 

 rent than in the coral. Kooted in the soil and upon rocks, the form of 

 its branches many times subdivided, above all, the coloured appendages 

 which At certain periods so closely resemble the corolla of a flower, 

 have all the form and appearance of plants. Until the eighteenth 

 century most naturalists classed the coral as Linnaeus did, without the 



