Presidents Address. 15 



an exact and precise nomenclature, known as the " Binomial 

 System," he contributed more perhaps than any other naturalist 

 to give a general and popular taste for the study of the natural 

 sciences. 



It was when Linnreus had attained to the height of his 

 fame, that the memorable discoveries and experiments of 

 Trembly on fresh-water polyps, and those of Ellis on the 

 marine corallines, established the animal nature of those 

 organisms, and rescued a large assemblage of the lower forms 

 of life from the doubtful position they had long occupied in 

 Natural History. 



Before their time. Zoophytes, as they had been named, were 

 generally considered to belong to the vegetable kingdom, 

 although some mineralogists were opposed to the vegetable 

 theory of marine corals, and maintained that they were simply 

 rocks and stones formed by a sub-marine deposit of calcareous 

 and argillaceous sediment, moulded into representations of 

 trees and mosses by the motion of the waves, by crystallisation, 

 or by some inherent vegetative power in mineral matter. 

 Ellis published his " Essay towards a Natural History of the 

 Corallines, and other marine productions of a like kind, com- 

 monly found on the Coasts of Great Britain and Ireland," in 

 1755,, a work that enriched science with a mass of important 

 facts, entirely and absolutely new, and so complete and satis- 

 factory in support of the animal nature of zoophytes and 

 sponges, that although at first it met with considerable opposi- 

 tion, it soon came to be generally accepted, and the discoveries 

 of EUis form an epoch in the history of Zoological Science in 

 the last century. The nullipore corallines only now remain 

 in the vegetable Idngdom. 



Towards the end of the last and beginning of the present 

 century, the science of Zoology is greatly indebted to the 

 labours of Lamarck. The term " invertebrate animals " origi- 

 nated with Lamarck, and it expresses, as Cuvier remarks, 

 perhaps the only circumstance in their organisation which is 

 common to them all. They were previously known as white- 

 blooded animals, a designation proved to be erroneous by 

 the discovery of an entire class — the Annelides — possessino- 

 coloured blood. The work on which Lamarck's fame princi- 



