32 
LIFE, IN Tip LOWER FORMS. 
which he elaborately examines the whole question, con- 
cluding with the following verdict : — “ Few, on examining 
the green Spongilla, would hesitate to pronounce it a vege- 
table, a conclusion which the exacter examination of the 
naturalist seems to have proved to be correct ; and when 
we pass on from it to an examination of the calcareous and 
siliceous marine genera, the impression is not so much 
weakened but that we can still say with Professor Owen, 
‘that if a lino could bo drawn between the animal and 
vegetable kingdoms, tho Sponges should be placed upon 
the vegetable side of that line.’ We shall possibly, how- 
ever, arrive at an opposite conclusion if, proceeding in our 
inquiry, we follow the siliceous species, iusensiblv gliding, 
on the one hand, into tho fibro-eomeous Sponge, filled 
with its mucilaginous fishy slime, and, on the other, into 
the fleshy Telhya, in whose oscula the first signs of an 
obscuro irritability shew themselves. Sponges, therefore, 
appear to be true zoophytes ; and it imparts additional 
interest to their study to consider them, as they probably 
are, the first matrix and cradle of organic life, and exhibit- 
ing before us the lowest organisations compatible with its 
existence.” * 
Many of our readers are probably cognisant of only one 
kind of Sponge,— the soft, plump, woolly, pale-browu 
article, so indispensable in our dressing-rooms ; or, at the 
most, two, if they chance to have noticed the large-pored 
coarser sort with which grooms wash carriages. Jt may 
surprise such persons to be informed that the streams and 
shores of the British Isles produce sixty or seventy distinct 
species of Sponge ; and that every coast, especially in the 
*Brit. Sponges, p. 68. 
