OF THE NATURE OF SPONGES. 29 



the sea's scum, or its spontaneous puUulations. " There 

 is found," says Gerarde, " growing upon the rockes neare 

 vntothesea, a certaine matter wrought together, of the fome 

 or froth of the sea, which we call spunges."* It is true that 

 the notion of then* animal nature was not allowed entirely 

 to die away, for every successive compiler retailed the re- 

 lations of Aristotle and Pliny, but no one was thence indu- 

 ced to remove the subjects of them to the animal kingdom. 

 Thus Ferrante Imperato, who is said to have had suspi- 

 cions of the animality of other zoophytes, unhesitatingly 

 describes the sponges among cryptogamous vegetables, and 

 expresses his opinion that, in their structure, they were 

 nearly allied to the Fungi. ~ His short preface to the de- 

 scription of the Neapolitan species contains a condensed 

 view of what he found in Aristotle, with whom he agrees 

 in attributing to the sponges in general a power of alter- 

 nate contraction and dilatation when under the influence of 

 some painful irritation, but he believes the contractile me- 

 dium to be the mucilaginous fluid that fills up the inter- 

 stices of the sponge, t 



Ray rejects what the antients have said of the life and 

 sensation of the sponge, of its spontaneous movements or 

 contractility, and of its food and nourishment as being part- 

 ly unproved and suspicious, and partly as false, for who, 

 he asks, can believe, on the sole argument of small shells 

 having been found in them, that sponges can feed on shells 

 or on fish ? He would rather believe that the shell-fish had 



• Herbal, emac. p. 1578. 



f Historia Natvrale di Ferrante Imperato, p. 635. Venetia, 167-2. 

 — " Nieremberg, en 1635, regardait les Eponges commes des produc- 

 tions animales, et soutenait cette opinion, quoique contraire a celle qui 

 etait alors generalement re9ue." Lainouroux, Hist. Cor. Flex. p. 10. 



