HISTORY OF ZOOPHYTOLOGY. 
35 
putation as a philosophical inquirer, and is even to this day the 
principal source of our knowledge in this department of natural 
history. In several essays presented subsequently to the Royal 
Society, and published in their Transactions, he continued to 
illustrate and extend his opinions, and defended them so suc- 
cessfully against his opponents, that they soon came to be very 
generally adopted. 
There was nothing unformed nor mystical in Ellis’s opinion. 
Certain marine productions which, under the names of Litho- 
phyta and Keratophyta, had been arranged among vegetables, 
and were still very generally believed to be so, he maintained 
and proved with a most satisfactory fulness of evidence, to be 
entirely of an animal nature — the tenements and products of 
animals similar in many respects to the naked fresh-water polype. 
By examining them, in a living state, through an ordinary mi- 
croscope, he saw these polypes in the denticles or cells of the 
zoophyte ; he witnessed them display their tentacula for the cap- 
ture of their prey,— -their varied actions and sensibility to ex- 
ternal impressions, — and their mode of propagation ; he saw 
further that the little creatures were organically connected with 
the cells and could not remove from them, and that although 
each cell was appropriated to a single individual, yet was this 
united u by a tender thready line to the fleshy part that occu- 
pies the middle of the whole coralline,” and in this manner con- 
nected with all the individuals of that coralline. The conclu- 
sion was irresistible — the presumed plant was the skin or cover- 
ing of a sort of miniature hydra, — a conclusion which Ellis 
strengthened by an examination of the covering separately, 
which, he said, was as much an animal structure as the nails or 
horns of beasts, or the shell of the tortoise, for it differs from 
66 sea-plants in texture, as well as hardness, and likewise in their 
chemical productions. For sea-plants, properly so called, such 
as the Algae, Fuci, &c. afford in distillation little or no traces 
of a volatile salt : whereas all the corallines afford a considerable 
quantity ; and in burning yield a smell somewhat resembling that 
of burnt horn, and other animal substances ; which of itself is a 
proof that this class of bodies, though it has the vegetable form, 
yet is not entirely of a vegetable nature.” * 
* Dr Good is in error when he states that the ammoniacal smell from burnt 
