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Functions of the Sponge. 
Trage , Pinceau , Agace , Tongue and Ife ; he ransacked the 
ancient strata of the earth in search of antediluvian species, and 
has described many fossil sponges, which before had been mis- 
taken for fruits or accidental mineral formations. But the phi- 
losophy of the sponge, the immutable foundations on which sci- 
entific discriminations of the species ought to rest, the minute 
investigation of the mechanism, the composition, and the uses 
of all the parts of this animal, and of the extraordinary pheno- 
mena it exhibits in the living state,— its mode of growth, — its 
kind of food, — its habits and diseases,— the means of cultivat- 
ing an animal, which has so long rendered important services to 
mankind, — its mode of propagating the species, and extending 
them over the globe, and the great purposes which it is destined 
to fulfil in the universe, have remained where Aristotle left 
them ; or rather, in this branch of the study, mankind have gone 
backward ever since his time : For Pliny, who wrote 400 years 
after him, conceived, that male and female organs of generation 
were placed separately on different sponges, although it had 
been known to the earliest naturalist, that this animal remains im- 
moveably attached to one spot through life, without locomotive 
power in any of its parts. So late as the year 1? 52, Peyssonell 
communicated to the Boyal Society of London, as the result of 
his extensive researches on the splendid marine sponges of the 
coasts of America, a detailed account of the formation of these 
substances, by numerous small worms found in their cavities. 
He says, that these worms construct the sponge like a bee-hive, 
for the purpose of protection and nourishment ; and even that 
the same kind of worms construct different species of sponge. If 
the plates which accompanied the writings of Aristotle, and to 
whie& he sometimes refers by signs in his description of parts, 
should hereafter be discovered among the ruins of antiquity, we 
will there find represented as occasional inhabitants of the sponge, 
the same worms which Peyssonell, 2000 years after him, mis- 
took for the fabricators of that substance. We now know, that 
the Nereis alluded to by Peyssonell, infests almost every other 
soft zoophyte as Well as the sponge. 
The celebrated Lamouroux, the latest, the most useful, and 
the most scientific writer on these animals, considers sponges as 
living masses, without organization, or apparent motion, without 
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