Natural History of British Zoophytes. 77 



florescences of it, * just as the flowers do not make the herb or tree 

 but are the results of the vegetative life proceeding to perfection. 

 Polypes, according to this fancy, bore the same relation to their po- 

 lypidom that flowers do to the trunk and branches of the tree ; both 

 grew by vegetation, but while the one evolved from the extremities 

 blossoms which shrunk not under external irritations and were there- 

 fore properly flowers, — the other put forth flowers which, because 

 they exhibited every sign of animality, were therefore with reason 

 considered animals. " Zoophyta," he writes to Ellis, " are construct- 

 ed very differently, living by a mere vegetable life, and are increas- 

 ed every year under their bark, like trees, as appears from the an- 

 nual rings in a section of the trunk of a Gorgonia. They are there- 

 fore vegetables, with flowers like small animals, which you have 

 most beautifully delineated. All submarine plants are nourished 

 by pores, not by roots, as we learn from Fuci. As zoophytes are, 

 many of them, covered with a stony coat, the Creator has been pleas- 

 ed that they should receive nourishment by their naked flowers. 

 He has therefore furnished each with a pore, which we call a mouth. 

 All living beings enjoy some motion. The zoophytes mostly live in 

 the perfectly undisturbed abyss of the ocean. They cannot there- 

 fore partake of that motion, which trees and herbs receive from the 

 agitation of the air. Hence the Creator has granted them a nervous 

 system, that they may spontaneously move at pleasure. Their lower 

 part becomes hardened and dead, like the solid wood of a tree. The 

 surface, under the bark, is every year furnished with a new living 

 layer, as in the vegetable kingdom. Thus they grow and increase ; 

 and may even be truly called vegetables, as having flowers, produ- 

 cing capsules, &c. Yet as they are endowed with sensation, and 

 voluntary motion, they must be called, as they are, animals; for ani- 

 mals differ from plants merely in having a sentient nervous system, 

 with voluntary motion ; nor are there any other limits between the 

 two. Those therefore who esteem these animalcules to be distinct 

 from their stalk, in my opinion, founded on observation, deceive and 

 are deceived." t 



* Zoophyta — " animalia composita, efflorescentia. Stirps vegetans, meta- 

 morphosi transiens in florens Animal." — Syst. 1287. " Zoophyta non sunt, uti 

 Lithophyta, auctores suae testae ; sed Testa ipsorum ; sunt enim corpora (uti 

 flores) imprimis generationis organa, adjectis nonnullis oris motusque instru- 

 mentis, ut motum, quem extrinsecus non habent, a se ipsis obtineant." — Syst. 



Nat. edit. 10. 799. When Berkenhout translates the first of these definitions 



" stems vegetating and changing into animals;" Synop. i. 15, he certainly de- 

 parts, if not from the letter, yet from the meaning of Linnaeus. 



f Lin. Corresp. vol. i. p. 151-2. 



