CLASSIFICATIONS OF ZOOPHYTES. 
73 
considered, to have its due influence on our systems. Notwith- 
standing, however, Blainville’s unquestionable merits, his very 
defective acquaintance with species will ever prevent him be- 
coming a first-rate systematist : he may sketch the outline, the 
details he cannot supply, and his attempt has exposed him to 
numerous errors : he is too fond of generalizations where his 
facts are few and specifical ; he wants the necessary neatness 
and brevity of definition, and he evinces everywhere such a to- 
tal disregard to the old nomenclature that his system is not like- 
ly to become popular, or to be generally adopted. Many of his 
alterations are excellent, and must meet the approval of all, for 
surely no one will henceforth reinstate the apolypous sponges 
and vegetating corallines, which he has so properly separated, 
to a rank amongst proper polypes ; and his removal of the Ma- 
drepores from the compound hydracolous polypidoms to a level 
with the Actiniae seems to be equally judicious, and beyond fu- 
ture cavil. 
System of H. M. D. De Blainville. (1834.) 
Class— ZOANTHA. 
Body regular, resembling a flower, more or less elongated, free or 
fixed, very contractile, furnished with an intestinal canal without 
distinct parietes, and with a single large terminal aperture encircled 
with multiform tentacula, always hollow, and in communication 
with the musculo-cavernous parenchyma of the skin. 
The class is divided into three families : 
The Soft — Actiniadse. Lucernaria, Actinia, &c. 
The Coriaceous — Zoanthus. 
The Calcareous — divided into 1. the Madrephyllicea , in which are 
the genera Turbinolia and Caryophyllsea : and 2. the Ma- 
drepores. 
Class— POLYPIARIA. 
Animals like the Hydra, viz. in general slender, furnished with a 
single series of filiform and not numerous tentacula, naked or con- 
tained in multiform cells (but never lamelliferous), clustered so as 
to form a polypidom very variable in shape and structure. 
Sub-Class I. P. So lida — Containing the families Millepores, of 
which there is no British genus amongst recent zoophytes ; 
and Tubuliporea which contains Tubulipora only. 
