142 A HANDBOOK FOR SOUTHPORT. 



to a low organisation ; its marvellous capacity of redintegra- 

 tion ; the organic junction of hundreds and thousands of 

 individuals in one body, the possibility of which fiction has 

 scarcely ventured to paint in its vagaries, have all in this class 

 their most remarkable illustration." 



Not much more than a century has elapsed since the true 

 nature of these productions was first discovered ; prior to that 

 period various opinions were entertained respecting them. By 

 one class of persons and these were by far the most numerous 

 they were regarded as undoubted subjects of the vegetable 

 kingdom, and were so arranged and classified in the various 

 systems of the most learned botanists of the day. Nor is this 

 to be wondered at when we consider the striking resemblance 

 which these objects bear to vegetables both in form and habits : 

 some of them being eminently arborescent in their mode of 

 growth, and fixed by a kind of root, either embedded in the 

 sand, or attached to rocks, stones, and other substances, in the 

 same manner as sea-weed, and consequently incapable of 

 locomotion, except during the brief period of their embryonic 

 life, a character formerly considered essential to the idea of 

 an animal, locomotion being common to all the animals then 

 known. 



By a second set of observers, at the head of whom stood the 

 illustrious Linnaeus, all the horny and flexible zoophytes were 

 considered to hold a station intermediate between the animal 

 and vegetable kingdoms, partaking of the nature of both. The 

 Lithophyta, however, were placed by him in the animal 

 kingdom, on the supposition that lime was always an animal 

 product. " The animalcules of the Lithophyta, like the test- 

 aceous tribes," he said, "fabricate their own calcareous 



