ON SOME INTERESTING POINTS IN THE HISTORY 
OF THE POLYZOA. 
By the Rey. THOMAS HINCKS, B.A. 1 
T HE Polyzoa have recently engaged the attention of many 
excellent observers and physiologists, and the result has 
been that much new light has been thrown on their history. 
The members of the class offer many attractions, both to the 
collector and the philosophic zoologist, and accordingly they 
have been diligently sought for and earnestly studied. The 
number of known forms has been largely increased, and a cor- 
responding advance has been made in the knowledge of their 
structure and development. But whilst we have been steadily 
attaining a more accurate conception of what they are, we seem 
to be as far removed as ever from any general agreement as to 
what they should be called. Continental Europe pertinaciously 
insists on giving them Ehrenberg’s name, Bryozoa\ England 
and America are equally unanimous and resolute in their ad- 
hesion to J. Y. Thompson’s very happy designation, Polyzoa . 
It is in all ways desirable that scientific nomenclature should be 
uniform and cosmopolitan, and it must be accounted a scandal 
that France, Germany, and England cannot agree upon a name 
for this important group. If the subject were referred, in the 
fashion of the day, to a conference, which might take place at 
the meeting of our own British Association, or of one of the 
kindred societies on the Continent, it might be possible to get 
rid of a diversity of usage which represents no scientific prin- 
ciple and has no special significance whatever. 
The Polyzoa have had their vicissitudes of fortune amidst 
the revolutions which have swept over zoological science. At a 
time when external resemblances had more weight with the 
classifier than the details of organisation, they ranked with the 
zoophytes. An increasing knowledge of their structure gradually 
detached them from their Coelenterate companions, and they 
appeared first as Molluscan Zoophytes, and then as Molluscoida, 
at the base of the great Molluscan series. In Professor Huxley’s 
latest work on classification they are raised, in combination with 
