EE VIEWS 
BRITISH MARINE POLYZOA.* 
E VERY naturalist knows the magnificent series of works on British 
Zoology for the publication of which we are indebted to the 
liberality and enterprise of Mr. Van Voorst. The Quadrupeds, Reptiles, and 
Stalk-eyed Crustacea of the late Professor Bell, whose recent death at a ripe 
old age is deplored by all who knew him ; Yarrell’s Birds and Fishes ; the 
History of British Echinodermata, by Professor Edward Forbes, and the 
splendid work on the Mollusca, by the last-named writer and Mr. Sylvanus 
Ilanley; and MM. Spence Bate and Westwood’s history of the Sessile- 
eyed Crustacea, are all standard works, covering a great part of the domain 
of British Zoology, and reflecting the highest credit both upon their authors 
and upon the publisher who has brought them out so handsomely printed 
and so admirably and lavishly illustrated. Besides the above-mentioned 
works, Dr. George Johnston, of Berwick, one of the best naturalists of his 
day, contributed to the series in 1849 a second edition of his History of 
British Zoophytes (originally published in Edinburgh in 1838), in which he 
included the whole of the animals to which the term Zoophyte was then 
commonly applied, namely, the Sea-anemones and Corals, and the Alcyonarian 
and Hydroid Polypes, belonging to the division Ccelenterata of more recent 
zoologists, and the Polyzoa, or so-called Ascidian polypes of some authors of 
that day, which had been regarded as for the most part allied to the hydroid 
Sertularians by the older zoologists, until the distinction between the two 
forms was pointed out by Grant and Milne-Edwards, followed about 1830 by 
Vaughan Thompson and Ehrenberg, and a little later by Dr. Arthur Farre. 
As a matter of course, in the thirty years which have elapsed since the 
publication of the last edition of Dr. Johnston’s work, much has been done 
in the study of a group of organisms so interesting to zoologists as these 
lowly creatures. Many new forms have been discovered, many points in 
their history have been cleared up, and new, unexpected, and most remarkable 
phenomena have been observed by the unwearied investigators of the last 
quarter of a century. Mr. Gosse’s useful and beautifully-illustrated History 
of British Sea-anemones and Corals was the outcome of the general attention 
paid to these flowers of the sea in consequence of the setting in of the fashion 
* A History of the British Marine Polyzoa. By Thomas Hincks, B.A., 
F.R.S. 2 vols. 8vo. London, Van Voorst, 1880. 
