HISTORY OF ZOOPHYTOLOGY. 
19 
tation, but while the one evolved from the extremities blossoms 
which shrunk not under external irritations and were therefore 
properly flowers, — the other put forth flowers which, because 
they exhibited every sign of animality, were therefore with reason 
considered animals. 66 Zoophyta,” he writes to Ellis, C£ are con- 
structed very differently, living by a mere vegetable life, and 
are increased every year under their bark, like trees, as appears 
from the annual rings in a section of the trunk of a Gorgonia. 
They are therefore vegetables, with flowers like small animals, 
which you have most beautifully delineated. All submarine 
plants are nourished by pores, not by roots, as we learn from 
Fuci. As zoophytes are, many of them, covered with a stony 
coat, the Creator has been pleased that they should receive 
nourishment by their naked flowers. He has therefore furnish- 
ed each with a pore, which we call a mouth. All living beings 
enjoy some motion. The zoophytes mostly live in the perfectly 
undisturbed abyss of the ocean. They cannot therefore par- 
take of that motion, which trees and herbs receive from the agi- 
tation of the air. Hence the Creator has granted them a ner- 
vous system, that they may spontaneously move at pleasure. 
Their lower part becomes hardened and dead, like the solid 
wood of a tree. The surface, under the bark, is every year fur- 
nished with a new living layer, as in the vegetable kingdom. 
Thus they grow and increase ; and may even be truly called ve- 
getables, as having flowers, producing capsules, &c. Yet as they 
are endowed with sensation, and voluntary motion, they must be 
called, as they are, animals ; for animals differ from plants mere- 
ly in having a sentient nervous system, with voluntary motion ; 
nor are there any other limits between the two. Those there- 
fore who esteem these animalcules to be distinct from their stalk, 
in my opinion, founded on observation, deceive and are de- 
ceived.”* 
There was something in this hypothesis peculiarly captivating 
to an imaginative mind, and few poets have possessed a richer 
fancy than Linnaeus. He seems to have ever fondly cherished 
the opinion, for in his curious Diary, in which he has enumerat- 
ed with much complacency all his works and merits, it is men- 
tioned as one of his principal recommendations to the respect 
* Lin. Corresp. Vol. i. p. 151-2. 
