388 DR. A. FARRE ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE CILIOBRACHIATE POLYPI. 
be still further strengthened when, in the commencement of the following century, 
the animals of some species of coral were described by Marsigli as flowers. 
This circumstance perhaps more than any other tended to confirm botanists in 
claiming these bodies for the vegetable kingdom, notwithstanding that it was main- 
tained by chemists that their structure exhibited more of an animal than a vege- 
table nature, and that even so early as the sixteenth century the animals of several 
had been distinctly described as such by Imperati. 
The discoveries and opinions, however, of this observer, who appears to have been 
the first to ascertain the animal nature of these Zoophytes, as well as the observations 
of Rumphius made upon many of the living corals in the Archipelago, seem to have 
been entirely neglected and forgotten ; nor does it appear that the botanical theory 
was disturbed until a similar discovery to that of Imperati was communicated to 
the Acad, des Scien. in 1 727 by Reaumur, founded upon the observations of Peysso- 
nell, who maintained that the supposed flowers of Marsigli were in fact aggregate 
animals analogous to Actinia, which latter animal was then, perhaps, the only one of 
the class to which a vegetable nature was not generally ascribed. 
This communication seems to have directed the attention of naturalists more im- 
mediately to the subject, and the subsequent discoveries of Trembley of the naked 
Polypi, in 1740, and the investigations of Bernard de Jussieu, Guettard, L^efling 
and Donatt, were greatly instrumental in pointing out the true nature of Zoophytes. 
But by none was the investigation pursued to so great an extent as by the indefati- 
gable Ellis, whose systematic work was the first of the kind that appeared upon this 
subject. In maintaining the entire animality of Zoophytes Ellis was strongly op- 
posed by Linnaeus, Baster, and Pallas, who still holding an opinion midway between 
the two that divided naturalists, maintained that they were of a mixed nature, partly 
animal and partly vegetable. 
With Linnaeus, however, and his contemporaries this view of the subject ceased, 
and subsequent investigations have completely exposed the fallacy, both of the vege- 
table and vegeto-animal theories. But the work of Ellis, as well as that of Pallas 
on the same subject, can be considered as but little more than a classification of the 
more solid, or least perishable, and least important parts, (the part called Polypary 
by Reaumur), without reference to the structure of the individual animals, which was 
then little understood, and was generally supposed to partake in all these cases of 
the simple nature of Hydra, and they were therefore so called by Linnaeus. 
This mode of classification, by no means likely to lead to a natural arrangement 
of the subject, was from the same cause adopted in the more recent systems of La- 
mark and Lamouroux, where the characters of the axis or polypary are again taken as 
the basis of arrangement ; though a considerable advance is made in founding se- 
condary divisions on the structure and form of that part of it, which is imme- 
diately inhabited by the individual animals, commonly called the cell. Still, how- 
ever, from a deficiency of knowledge the most important parts are disregarded, and 
