166 Mr. A. H. Hassall’s Catalogue of Irish Zoophytes. 
XXI.— Catalogue of Irish Zoophytes. By Anraur Hiit 
Hassauz, Esq., M.R.C.S.L. With 3 Plates. 
“Ir is delightful to see by these miniature existences, small 
almost to invisibility, and by their careful organization as 
finely contrived as in the grandest creature, that greatness 
and littleness make no difference to Him in His Creation or 
in His Providence. They reveal to us that magnitude is nothing 
in His sight; that He is pleased to frame and to regard the 
small and weak as benignly and as attentively as the mighty 
and the massive. We are high and low, great and small, as 
to each other, but not to Him.”—Sharon Turner’s Sacred 
History. 
In no part of the animal kingdom is the truth of the above 
remarks more pleasingly or more beautifully manifested than 
in the present order ; in no other department do we meet with, 
to an equal extent at least, the same diversity and elegance of 
form so illustrative of the fertility of invention and beauty of 
conception of the Divine Mind. The heart must be cold and 
insensate indeed, that, on beholding these interesting “ minims 
of creation” is not tempted to exclaim with the Psalmist, “in 
wisdom,” beneficent, infinite wisdom, “ hast thou made them 
all.” 
The whole of the zoophytes enumerated in the following 
Catalogue, with two exceptions, were found in the bays of 
Dublin and Killiney during the winter of 1838 and spring of 
1839. ‘The extent of coast embraced by these bays is about 
sixteen miles, abounding more in marine productions than any 
other known locality of similar dimensions. 
The distribution of zoophytes is often extremely local, in 
many cases a species being restricted to one particular spot 
of perhaps not more than half a mile or a mile in extent; it 
is, on this account, that I have given the habitat of each sepa- 
rately. 
The law of the spiral development of similar parts, so evi- 
dent in the vegetable kingdom, is here also very generally ma- 
nifested both in the form of the polypes as well as in that of 
the polypidoms—this is particularly remarkable in Antennu- 
laria antennina, Thuiaria thyja, Campanularia verticellata, 
and Vesicularia spinosa; and traces of this arrangement may 
be detected in some part or other of the structure of the ma- 
jority of zoophytes. 
In this catalogue the term Zoophyte is used in the ex- 
tended signification in which it was employed by Ellis, who 
embraced in his work the Articulated Corallines and Sponges, 
denying, however, the existence of polypes in the latter, and 
