HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION. 



It is scarcely more than one hundred years since naturalists gen 

 erally recognized the fact that corals belong to the animal king- 

 dom. Though in the year 1599 Fera^nte Imperato, a naturalist 

 of Naples, in his work, " Histoire JSTaturelle," asserted that fact, he 

 found few, if any, believers in his statement. In every reference 

 that I have seen to this author he is referred to as an " Apothe- 

 cary of Naples " — seemingly overlooking the fact that this man 

 as a naturalist possessed knowledge nearly 150 years in advance 

 of any other naturalist in regard to the Zoophytes. To him 

 should be given the honor which is generally accorded to men of 

 the eighteenth century. This book was republished in 1672, but 

 even then attracted little attention, and subsequently seems to 

 have been relegated to oblivion. De Bla^inville speaks of his 

 work as being one 'of the most important in zoophytological 

 history. 



Whatever had been the importance of Impera^to's work at the 

 time, his statements had fallen into complete oblivion at the 

 beginning of the eighteenth century. In 1706, Count Marsioli, or 

 Marsilli as his name is sometimes written, in a letter to the 

 Abbe BiGJiON, and later in 1711 in "Brieve ristretto del Sagio 

 fisico intorno alia Storia del Mare," Venice, 1711, reasserted the 

 doctrine of the vegetable nature of corals and makes "the 

 remarkable assertion that he had seen the plants in full flower 

 mistaking the expanded tentacles for the petals of a flower. 



JfiAN Andre Peysonnelle, a physician of Marseilles, saw the 

 error into which Marsigli had fallen, and in 1727, in a communi- 

 cation to the Academy of Sciences at Paris, reasserted the doc- 

 trine of Impebato, that the seeming flowers were animals, and 

 that the hard part was provided for the protection of the ani- 

 mals. This communication was entrusted to the great naturalist, 

 Keaumur, to be presented to the Academy, but so ludicrous did 



