126 THE OCEAN WORLD. 



From very early times, the coral has been adopted as an object 

 of ornament. From the highest antiquity, also, efforts were made to 

 ascertain its true origin, and the place assignable to it in the works of 

 Nature. Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny considered that the 

 coral was a plant. Tournefort, in 1700, reproduced the same idea. 

 Eeaumur slightly modified this opinion of the ancients, and declared 

 his opinion that the coral was the stony product of certain marine 

 plants. Science was in this state when a naturalist, who has acquired 

 a great name, the Count de Marsigli, made a discovery which threw 

 quite a new light on the true origin of this natural product. He 

 announced that he had discovered the flowers of the coral. He repre- 

 sented these flowers in his fine work, " La Physique de la Mer," which 

 includes many interesting details respecting this curious product of 

 the ocean. How could it be longer doubted that the coral was a plant, 

 since he had seen its expanded flowers ? 



No one doubted it, and Eeaumur proclaimed everywhere the dis- 

 covery of the happy Academician. 



Unhappily, a discordant note soon mingled in this concert. It 

 even emanated from a pupil of Marsigli ! 



Jean Andre de Peyssonnel was born at Marseilles in 1694. He 

 was a student of medicine and natural history at Paris when the 

 Academie des Sciences charged him with the task of studying the 

 coral on the sea-shore. Peyssonnel began his observations in the 

 neighbourhood of Marseilles in 1723. He pursued it on the North 

 African coast, where he had been sent on a mission by the Govern- 

 ment. Aided by a long series of observations as exact as they were 

 delicate, Peyssonnel demonstrated that the pretended flowers which 

 the Count de Marsigli thought he had discovered in the coral, were 

 true animals, and showed that the coral was neither plant nor the 

 product of a plant, but a being with life, which he placed in the first 

 " rung " of the zoological ladder. " I put the flower of the coral," 

 says Peyssonnel, " in vases full of sea-water, and I saw that what had 

 been taken for a flower of this pretended plant was, in truth, only an 

 insect, like a little sea-nettle, or polyp. I had the pleasure of seeing 

 removed the claws or feet of the creature, and having put the vase 

 full of water, which contained the coral, in a gentle heat over the fire, 

 all the small insects seemed to expand. The polyp extended his feet, 

 and formed what M. de Marsigli and I had taken for the petals of a 



