RED OR PRECIOUS CORAL. 5 



Before Peyssonnel gave full descriptions of the polyp and its 

 physiology he had an opportunity of studying the polyps of a 

 madrepore, which he says are much larger and more easily 

 examined. Each is placed in the centre of a pore, and causes 

 the structure to increase in every direction by lifting itself 

 further and further from the centre of the stone. Each deposits 

 a liquor which runs along the furrow, becomes hard, and causes 

 the coral to increase proportionally in every direction. Corals, 

 therefore, are truly zoophytes, formed by the labour of the 

 animals which inhabit them. 



Some of his views, as might be expected, were crude. Thus 

 he supposed that corals produced spawn enveloped in a viscous 

 substance, which fastens to rock, glass, broken earthenware, and 

 stones. The egg is duly hatched, and furnishes the animal 

 which resembles the sea-polyp. It is now known that the egg is 

 developed internally, and that a ciliated larva issues from the 

 mouth of the polyp. He also erroneously imagined that a par- 

 ticular tube (gut), which in the cuttlefish secretes ink, in this 

 case secretes matter which hardens into the dense axis of the 

 coral. Nature, he quaintly says, had furnished these animals 

 with claws (tentacles), which seize their prey as it passes, and 

 thus they are nourished.* 



He described two kinds of apparatus used in coral-fishing — ■ 

 one for smooth ground (same as described by Gassendi in his life 

 of Peyreskius), the other, the salabre, where the bottom is rocky. 

 Peyssonnel found that coral grew amongst the rocks and in the 

 caverns plentifully in ten to twelve fathoms of water, but also as 

 deep as one hundred and twenty fathoms. He cites the coast of 

 Barbary, which lies open to the north, as a proof that coral 

 flourishes there as well as in southern exposures. 



When Peyssonnel's observations were first communicated 

 to the French Academy, they were received for the most part 

 with incredulity and opposition. There was little sympathy, 

 indeed, with the young surgeon who had so loyally stood by his 



* Justice is done to Peyssonnel both by Milne -Edwards in his Hist. Nat. 

 des Coralliaires, Suites a Buffon, 1857, and by Lecaze Duthiers in his Hist. 

 Nat. du Corail, 1864. The former gives interesting quotations from the 

 manuscript of Peyssonnel preserved in the Library of the Museum of Natural 

 Historv, Paris. 



