HISTORY OF ZOOPHYTOLOGY. 
21 
he appears to have been puzzled what to make of zoophytes ; 
they were certainly not sea-weeds, — and it were too humiliating 
to adopt a once rejected theory, — when happily the Systema 
Naturse came to his aid, and he instantly adopted with zeal the 
vegeto-animal fancy, because, he says, it illustrated in a wonder- 
ful manner other things which were previously obscure and in- 
comprehensible, and because it was in perfect keeping with the 
doctrine which taught that animated beings were a series of links 
constituting one long chain that could not be broken without 
violation to the continuity of organization,-— the different species 
being so closely connected on this side and that, that neither 
sense nor imagination can detect the line which separates one 
from the other. It must be allowed that in Baster the doctrine 
of Linnaeus has found its best advocate. He tells us that in 
zoophytes there are too many signs of a perfect vegetation to 
permit us to believe that they can owe their origin to animal- 
cules so minute as to require a microscope to see them, and the 
great simplicity of whose organization altogether unfits them for 
perfecting such works : and as from the law of continuity indi- 
cated above it was reasonable to presume the existence of beings 
in which the distinctions between animals and plants should meet 
and amalgamate, so by a comparison of their definitions it may 
be made obvious that these distinctions disappear in zoophytes. 
A plant is an organized body without sense or spontaneous mo- 
tion, adhering by means of a root to some foreign substance 
whence it derives the material of its life and increase : an ani- 
mal, on the contrary, is an organized body endowed with sen- 
sation and perception, which can, of its own free will, make cer- 
tain movements peculiar to itself. Like the plant, zoophytes 
grow fixed by a root ; and yet at the same time they are ani- 
mals, for they show when touched that they feel by some mo- 
tion, and when they perceive food proper for them they seize 
and devour it by the action of certain members. 
Having in this manner commended the theory to our favour, 
and shown its reasonableness and consonance to nature, Baster 
goes on to explain the manner in which he conceives his ex- 
periments prove that the Sertulariadae or flexible corallines grow. 
The ova or seeds of these zoophytes, he asserts, pullulate from 
the body of the mother in the likeness of tender articulations 
