THE LOWEE FOEM8 OF LIFE. 75 



however, the matter was taken up by a thoughtful member of the 

 Eoyal Society a merchant in London whose name, John Ellis, is 

 bound up with the establishment of a great scientific truth. Ellis 

 took up the study of Zoophytes for his amusement,, and examined 

 them minutely with the microscope. The result was the complete 

 corroboration of Peysonnel's views, and the overthrow of the belief 

 in the vegetable character of Zoophytes. His celebrated work 

 entitled " An Essay towards a Natural History of the Corallines 

 and other Marine Productions of the like kind, commonly found on 

 the Coasts of Great Britain and Ireland" was published in 1755, 

 and in 1768 the Eoyal Society awarded to him the Copley Medal, as 

 the highest reward they could offer for what they termed, "the 

 great accession which natural knowledge has received from your 

 most accurate and ingenious investigation." Linnaeus was at this 

 time in the height of his great reputation, and he entered at once 

 into the spirit of Ellis' s discovery. Curious, enough, however, he 

 confined his belief to those forms which built up their skeletons 

 with lime such as Coral while he still maintained that the 

 Zoophytes which lived in a horny polypidom, as it is termed, were 

 flowers. The whole discussion is most interesting, and will repay 

 perusal. Since that day the study of these forms has left little to be 

 discovered, and, as I shall show presently, the animals which consti- 

 tute the formerly called flowers of Zoophytes are nothing more nor 

 less than close relations to the Hydra, of which, as I have shown, the 

 type lives in fresh water. 



The description and figure of this creature which I have given 

 will forcibly remind the reader of the many-armed monster, the 

 Pieuvre, which is described with such horrid and disgusting detail 

 by Victor Hugo, in his new work, "The Toilers of the Sea." 

 This creature, the octopus or poulp, is called by the ancients a 

 polypus ; and it was the miniature likeness of our little Hydra to the 

 octopus, which induced Eeaumer to give the name of polypi to the 

 family. The term Hydra is derived from that of the monster which 

 was said to exist in the form of a sea-serpent, the head of which, 

 as the fable runs, was reproduced as often as it was cut off ; and it 

 is a very curious coincidence that we should have discovered in 

 modern days a creature whose head or tail will be reproduced when 

 cut off, just as that in the fable was said to have been. It is also 

 a most interesting fact that the little polyp, just three-quarters of 

 an inch long, should be, to some extent, externally at least, a 

 counterpart of the octopus described by Victor Hugo as destroying 

 human beings by entwining their long spinous arms about them. It 

 is not, however, certain that the largest specimen of octopus has 

 actually killed a human being ; at least, I am not aware of such an 



