72 THE OCEAN WORLD. 
corpuscles, as in the Mosses, which seem to be invested with some of the f 
characteristics of animal life, for they appear to be gifted with organs of 
locomotion, namely, vibratile cilia, by means of which they execute 
movements which are to all appearance quite voluntary. Alongside I 
these, vegetable germs and fecundating corpuscles, known as anthe - | 
rozoides among the Algae, Mosses, and Ferns, which, when floating 
in water, go and come like the inferior animals, seeking to penetrate 
into cavities, withdrawing themselves, returning again, and again intro- 
ducing themselves, and exhibiting all the signs of an apparent effort- 
Let us compare the Infusoria, or even the Polypi, Coral insects, and 
Gorgons, with these shifting vegetable organisms, and say if it is easy 
to determine, without considerable study, which is the plant and which 
the animal. The precise line of demarcation which it is so desirable I 
to establish between the two kingdoms of Nature is indeed diffi cult 
to trace. 
The word zoophyte, to which this comparison introduces us, seems 
very happily applied : it is derived from the Greek word foov, 
animal, and tpvrbv, plant ; and is, as it seems to us, quite worthy 
of being retained in Science, because it consecrates and materialises, I 
so to speak, a sort of fusion between the two kingdoms of Nature ] 
at their confines. Let us guard ourselves, however, from carrying 
this idea too far, and, upon the faith of a happy word, altering alto- 
gether the true relations of created beings. In adopting the name 
zoophyte, to indicate a great division of the animal kingdom, the reader 
must not imagine that there is any ambiguity about the creatines ' 
designated, or that they belong at once to both kingdoms, or that 
they might be ranged indifferently in the one or the other. Zoophytes 
are animals, .and nothing but animals; the justification for using a 
designation which signifies animal plant is, that many of them have 
an exterior resemblance to plants ; that they divide themselves by ofl- , 
shoots, as some plants do, and are sometimes crowned with organs 
tinted with lively colours, like some flowers. 
This analogy between plants and zoophytes is nowhere more appa- 
rent than in the coral. Booted in the soil and upon rocks, the form of 
its branches many times subdivided, above all, the coloured appendages 1 
which at certain periods so closely resemble the corolla of a flower, | 
have all the form and appearance of plants. Until the eighteenth cen- 
tury most naturalists classed tho coral as Linnmus did, without the leas* 
