ON THE SICILIAN CORAL FISHIRY. J^J 



some resemblance, and named it lithodendron, or stony plant, 



on account of its hardness. It was so called by Dioscorides and 



Pliny. These authors and their contemporaries did not attempt 



to contradict by the most trifling examination, what the poet 



Ovid (his head full of transformations) had asserted : that under 



the water it was a soft plant, but, immediately on being taken 



from the sea, became hard. This opinion prevailed for a long and many 



time, and was encouraged in later times by many great natural- "^o'^^rns, 



ists. Of this number was the celebrated Cesalpino. 



Our Baccone, who took much pains to investigate the nature Baccone's 

 of coral, could not divest himself of this idea ; but, gifted as he opinion of it. 

 was with great sagacity and penetration, not being convinced, 

 either from his own observations or those of others, that coral 

 was a mere plant, and still less that it was a stone, he imagined, 

 that the milky juice, which drops from the pores of fresh coral, 

 was its seed ; which, being dispersed in the sea, is precipitated 

 and gradually accumulated in a regular form in the capsules 

 nature provides for it^. 



This opinion, tending to alienate naturalists from the belief Count Mar- 

 of the vegetable nature of coral, was entirely removed by the *'^^''** 

 publication of the valuable and erudite work of the celebrated 

 conte Marsilli, entitled Storia del Mare j who, led away by his 

 .imagination, or rather deriving little aid from the state of 

 natural philosophy at that time, suggested the idea, that the 

 movable substances at the extremity of the branches were the 

 octopetalous flowers of the coral, and thus revived the old 

 opinion. 



Tournefort, who, in the pursuit of his favourite study of Embraced by 

 botany, had remarked the vegetation of stones in the grotto of Tournefort 

 Antiparos, eagerly adopted this idea ; and was followed by Ray, 

 Boerhaave, Klein, and many others of that time. 



No sooner had naturalists begun again to take up the Supposed to be 

 observations of Baccone, than they discovered in the hard sub- ^ P'^'^'J ?"' 

 stance of coral a sort of earthy concretion : but this not being careous ^rth" 

 sufficient to induce them to expunge it from the list of vege- 

 table substances, they considered it as a marine plant encrusted 

 with calcareous earth deposited by the sea. Lehman was of 

 this opinion, to which the mineralogist Baumer was also much 

 inclined. 



* Ses Rechescher sur le Corail, and Museo di Fisica. 



Our 



