136 THE AQUARIAN NATURALIST. 



racter of distinction between the two classes of ani- 

 mated beings. The zoologist claimed none of them, 

 if we except the Actinia, for his province and study, 

 but left them, without dispute, to botanical writers; 

 and if any of these, in reference to a very few zoo- 

 phytes of the less arborescent character than the rest, 

 hazarded a whispered conjecture that they were 

 wrongly classed, it died away in the utterance, and 

 raised no echo to awaken further inquiry. 



The only opposition to the botanical theory came 

 from the mineralogists, who, some of them, questioned 

 the vegetability of such of these productions as were 

 of a hard and stony nature, contending that they 

 were rather rocks or stones formed by the sediment 

 or agglutination of a submarine general compost of 

 calcareous and argillaceous materials, moulded into 

 the figure of trees and mosses by the action of the 

 waves, by crystallization, by the incrustation of real 

 fuci, or by some imagined vegetative power in brute 

 matter*. 



It was only somewhere about the year 1730 that 

 Peyssonnel, a physician residing at Marseilles, whose 

 opportunities of observing these organisms entitled 

 him to give an opinion upon the subject, first ventured 

 to maintain, that what had previously been described 

 as the " blossoms" of the coral, were true animals 

 (" insects," he thought proper to call them), analogous 

 to the Actiniae or Sea- Anemones ; that the coral was 

 secreted in a fluid form by the inhabitant Actinise, 

 and became afterwards fixed, hard, and changed to 

 stone ; and that all other stony plants, and even 

 * Johnston, Brit. Zoophytes. 



