From the earliest times in which we find re- 
searches into the systems of nature, we discover dif- 
Sculties in tracing the separation subsisting between 
the animal and vegetable kingdoms: obscurity enve- 
lopes the subject. We find irritability in the vegeta- 
ble, and we seek and find something like the facuity 
of self-government : we see Sensibility in the lowest 
grade of animal life, but in tracing its functions, 
find them so equivoeally manifested that the subsiste 
ing sensibility, amounts almest to an unrecognizable 
condition of the will. The mode by which syste« 
matists sought to meet a difficulty which patient ob- 
seryation had failed to unravel, has been by consti- 
iuting an intermediate order of life, so vaguely cha- 
racterized to embrace the doubtful conterminous 
tribes of animalsand plants. ‘To these they have ap- 
plied the terms of phytozoa and zoophyta, plant ani- 
mals and animal plants, as the ene or other nature 
seemed most predominant to shew their approxima- 
tion to vegetables or animals ; while the designation 
of lithophyta, ceratophyta and caleiphyta, in expressing 
the horny or cretaceous nature of the animal or 
vegetable structure suggested, also their analogy to 
mineral aggregations. In the term PSEUDOZOARIA 
proposed by De Blainville, to include all the equivo- 
cal living forms, in which it becomes absolutely 
a matter of indifference,. whether we make them 
animals or vegetables, since they fall within the 
definitions employed to characterize beth,.we Have 
groups of the corallines and conferve at one extre- 
mity containing fibrous and cretaceous bodies, curi- 
ously articulated, and branching into radiated tufts, 
