38 OPINIONS AND DISCOVERIES 



ther proceed from the incineration of the worms that had 

 sheltered in the cells. That the oscula were the mouths 

 of the sponge had, he thinks, been proved by Ellis ; and 

 be and Giraud Chantrons had, with no better success than 

 their predecessors, sought in vain for polyjies in the fresh 

 water species.* 



Cuvier was led by the custom of others to place the 

 sponges at the end of the polypiferous zoophytes, f but he 

 merely glances at a tribe wluch he had never personally 

 examined, and which had never engaged his attention. 

 The remarks of Lamouroux are more diffuse, while his 

 opinions are equally unformed. With him the sponges con- 

 stitute a separate family among the corticiferous polypi- 

 doms, or such as are composed of a rind, or exterior and 

 enveloping crust, supported by an internal or central 

 axis, but they have no polypes, or these are imperceptible. 

 From all that had been written about them, it follows that 

 the mucilaginous fluid is the most essential part of the 

 sponge ; that the polypes, if there are any, should be found 

 in that fluid, or that it is itself the animal of this polypidom. 

 Its form is subordinated to that of its habitation ; it is per- 

 haps an animated mass which may be divided without de- 

 struction to the vital principle, in which there is no per- 

 ceptible organization, no very apparent motion, no mouth, 

 no organs, nothing, in a word, of that structui'e which we 

 observe in other animals. This hypothesis, he adds, is 

 not new, but is less problematical than any other, and the 

 observations which he had made upon the sponges of the 



• Hist. Nat. des Vers, iii. p. 162-166. Paris, 1827- 

 t Regne Animal, iii. p. 321. 



