208 BRITISH CORALLINES. 



very evident that they are unfurnished with that vascular or 

 glandular apparatus by which the lime that invests the in- 

 ternodes is secreted. The crust itself is homogeneous, 

 either smooth and unpunctured, or, as it is asserted of many 

 foreign species, perforated with pores sufficiently large to be 

 visible to the naked eye, but these pores are not the exte- 

 rior orifices of cells proceeding from the axis, nor indeed 

 have they any intimate communication with it. 



The history of the Corallines in respect of their claims to 

 a registry among vegetables or animals is nearly the same as 

 that of all other zoophytes. They were universally believed 

 to be sea-mosses or confervse,* until Ellis, swayed in this 

 instance by analogy chiefly, demanded their removal to a 

 higher category. " The coralline," he says, " is an animal 

 growing in the form of a plant, whose stem is fixt to other 

 bodies, and is composed of capillary tubes, whose extremi- 

 ties pass through a calcareous crust, and open into pores on 

 the surface.""*f* That we may perceive these pores, it is ne- 

 cessary they should be viewed immediately on the coralline 

 being taken out of the sea, for after it has dried, they 

 are scarcely to be distinguished from a polished superficies 

 " without the help of the very best glasses."^ Notwith- 

 standing their minuteness, Ellis had no doubts of these 

 pores being polype-cells, although it does not appear 

 that he was ever able to detect any signs of life in them. 

 Linnaeus readily adopted Ellis's opinion, for the corallines 

 contain a large quantity of lime in their composition, and he 



* " Corallina est planlce genus in aquis nascens, tenuissime divisum, 

 ex partibus constans articulatione quadam veluti conjunctis." Raii Syn. 

 i. p. 33. 



t Zoophytes, p. 108. \ Nat. Hist, of Corallines, p. 47. 



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