114 CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. fvr. 



have resented the treatment he met with. For he sent 

 all further communications to the Eoyal Society of 

 London, which never had, and it is to be hoped never 

 will have, anything of an academic constitution ; and 

 finally took himself off to Guadaloupe, and became lost 

 to science altogether. 



Fifteen or sixteen years after the date of Peyssonel's 

 suppressed paper, the Abbe* Trembley published his won- 

 derful researches upon the fresh-water Hydra. Bernard de 

 Jussieu and Guettard followed them up by like inquiries 

 upon the marine sea-anemones and corallines ; Reaumur, 

 convinced against his will of the entire justice of Peys- 

 sonel's views, adopted them, and made him a half-and- 

 half apology in the preface to the next published volume 

 of the " Memoires pour servir & FHistoire des Insectes ; " 

 and, from this time forth, Peyssonel's doctrine 'that corals 

 are the work of animal organisms has been part of the 

 body of established scientific truth. 



Peyssonel, in the extract from his memoir already 

 cited, compares the flower-like animal of the coral to a 

 " poulpe," which is the French form of the name " poly- 

 pus," " the many-footed," which the ancient naturalists 

 gave to the soft-bodied cuttle-fishes, which, like the coral 

 animal, have eight arms, or tentacles, disposed around 

 a central mouth. Reaumur, admitting the analogy in- 

 dicated by Peyssonel, gave the name of polypes, not only 

 to the sea-anemone, the coral animal, and the fresh-water 

 Hydra, but to what are now known as the Polyzoa, and 

 lie termed the skeleton which they fabricate a ''poly- 

 pier" or " polypidom." 



The progress of discovery, since Reaumur's time, has 

 made us very completely acquainted with the structure 

 and habits of all these polypes. We know that, among 

 the sea-anemones and coral-forming animals, each polype 

 has a mouth leading to a stomach, which is open at its 



