HISTORY OF ZOOPHYTOLOGY. 
23 
could blind him to the fallacy of the consequent reasoning. 
The analogy attempted to be drawn between the eggs of zoo- 
phytes and the seeds of plants has no existence, for every tyro 
knows well that the coat or skin of a seed in no instance ever 
pushes forth radical fibres, or ever exhibits any sign of vegeta- 
tion ; — it is a dead part which is cast off or corrupts, and exerts 
no further influence on vegetation than as a protection to the 
cotyledons and embryo which it invests, so that if it is true that 
the coat of the ova of zoophytes is the source of their vegetative 
part, as Baster says, that coat must be of a very different na- 
ture from the skin of seeds. It would have been better to have 
compared the oviform bodies of the zoophyte with the buds of 
the tree, and he might have disported with this fancy to some 
effect, for there are many analogical resemblances, and the in- 
applicability of the illustration is not so very plain. Still it is 
inapplicable, for buds grow from the absorption of water and in- 
organic matter which is diffused and assimilated by means of a 
certain determinate organization, while the covering of zoophy- 
tes receives no increase except through the medium of its poly- 
pes ; — it has no sap-vessels, no spiral tubes, no cellular paren- 
chyma, no absorbent roots, no pores and spiracles on the sur- 
face, so that all its material must be derived from an internal 
source ; and to say that a body vegetates when the nutriment is 
received and assimilated in a different manner, and by a differ- 
ent structure from what it is in plants, and is productive in its 
assimilation of opposite principles, is to use terms in so vague a 
sense as would be intolerable in any science. 
Neither the authority of Linnaeus, nor the imperfect experi- 
ments of Baster, had any effect on Ellis, who steadily opposed 
this vegeto-animal doctrine, and whose superior knowledge made 
it easy for him to detect and point out the erroneousness of the 
observations on which it principally rested. In reference to the 
opinion itself he wrote to Linnaeus, — <€ artful people may puzzle 
the vulgar, and tell us that the more hairy a man is, and the 
longer his nads grow, he is more of a vegetable than a man who 
shaves his hair or cuts his nails ;* that frogs bud like trees, 
* Bohadsch in answer to those who believed that the Pennatulae were plants 
uses the same argument. — De Anim. Mar. p. 123. This author, who wrote in 
1761, was a strenuous advocate for the unmixed animality of zoophytes. 
