Natural History of British Zoophytes. 65 



that they were wrongly classed, it died away in the utterance, and 

 raised no echo to further inquiry. The only opposition to the bo- 

 tanical theory came from the mineralogists, who some of them ques- 

 tioned the vegetability of such of these productions as were of a 

 hard and stony nature, contending they were rather rocks or stones 

 formed by the sediment and agglutination of a submarine general com- 

 post of calcareous and argillaceous materials, moulded into the figures 

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

 by the incrustation of real fuci, or by some imagined vegetative 

 power in brute matter. But although not more — perhaps less 

 repugnant to the outward sense than the opposite hypothesis, yet 

 the mineral theory seems at no time to have obtained very general 

 favour or credit ; and accordingly we find that, in the works of 

 Tournefort and Ray, the leading naturalists of the age immediately 

 antecedent to the discoveries which led to the modern doctrines, the 

 zoophytes, whether calcareous and hard, or horny and flexible, were 

 arranged and described among sea- weeds and mosses without any 

 misgivings concerning the propriety of doing so. 



Ferrante Imperato, an apothecary in Naples, was the first natu- 

 ralist, according to M. De Blainville, distinctly to publish, as the 

 result of his proper observations, the animality of corals and madre- 

 pores ; and he is said to have accompanied the descriptions of the 

 species which fell under his notice with illustrative figures of con- 

 siderable accuracy. His work, of which De Blainville speaks high- 

 ly as one of the most important in the history of zoophytology,* was 

 printed at Naples in 1599 ; but although reprinted some years af- 

 terwards (1672), it, and the knowledge it contained, sunk into such 

 complete oblivion, that when Peyssonnel, in the year 1727, commu- 

 nicated the same discovery to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, it 

 was received by the members of that learned body in a manner which 

 is sufficient to convince us that it was entirely new to them, and ex- 

 posed the author to the obloquy and censure which are the usual 

 portions of an original discoverer. 



Some time previously to the publication of Peyssonnel's discovery, 

 those who maintained that the stony zoophytes were plants had re- 



* Lamouroux on the contrary places Imperato on the same level with Ges- 

 ner, Boccone, and Shaw — none of whom had any distinct notion of the animali- 

 ty of any zoophytes, and had no doubt of the vegetable nature of almost all of 

 them. " Les observations de ces hommes celebres, au lieu d'eclairer les natura- 

 listes sur cette branche interessante de la science, embrouillaient encore plus 

 son etude." — Lam. Cor. Flex. Introd. p. xiv. The opinions of Rumphius seem 



to have been as explicitly stated as those of Imperato, but they effected nothing . 



Pall. Elench. 14, and 275. 



NO. I. E 



