128 
THE OCEAN WORLD. 
From yery early times, the coral has been adopted as an object of 
finery. From the highest antiquity also, efforts were made to ascer- 
tain its true origin, and the place assignable to it in the works of Nature. 
Theophrastus, Dioscorides, aud Pliny considered that the coral was a 
plant. Tournefort, in 1700, reproduced the same idea. Efaumur 
slightly modified this opinion of the ancients, and declared his opinion 
that the coral was the stony product of certain marine plants. Science 
was in this state when a naturalist, who has acquired a great name, 
the Count de Marsigli, made a discovery which threw quite a new 
light on the true origin of this natural product. He announced that 
he had discovered the flowers of the coral. He represented these 
flowers in his fine work, “ La Physique de la Mer,” which includes 
many interesting details respecting this curious product of the ocean. 
How could it be longer doubted that the coral was a plant, since he 
had seen its expanded flowers ? 
No one doubted it, and Keaumur proclaimed everywhere the disco- 
very of the happy Academician. 
Unhappily, a discordant note soon mingled in this concert. It 
even emanated from a pupil of Marsigli ! 
Jean Andre de Peyssonnel was bom at Marseilles in 1694. He was 
a student of medicine and natural history at Paris when the Academie 
des Sciences charged him with the task of studying the coral on the 
sea shore. Peyssonnel began his observations in the neighbourhood of 
Marseilles in 1723. Ho pursued it on the North African coast, where 
he had been sent on a mission by the Government. Aided by a long 
series of observations as exact as they were delicate, Peyssonnel 
demonstrated that the pretended flowers which the Count de Marsigli 
thought he had discovered in the coral, were true animals, and showed 
that the coral was neither plant nor the product of a plant, but a being 
with life, which he placed in the first 4 round ’ of the zoological ladder. 
“ I put the flower of the coral,” says Peyssonnel, “ in vases full of sea 
water, and I saw that what had been taken for a flower of this pre- 
tended plant, was, in truth, only an insect, like a little sea-nettle, or 
polype. I had the pleasure of seeing removed the claws or feet of the 
creature, and having put the vase full of water, which contained the 
coral, in a gentle heat over the fire, all the small insects seemed to 
expand. The polype extended his feet, and formed what M. de 
Marsigli and I had taken for the petals of a flower. The calyx of 
