had written a memoir for the express purpose of demonstrating that these “orties” are animals; and with this important paper Peyssonel must necessarily have been familiar.  Therefore, when he declared the “flowers” of the red coral to be little “orties,” it was the same thing as saying that they were animals of the same general nature as sea-anemones.  But to Peyssonel’s contemporaries this was an extremely startling announcement.  It was hard to imagine the existence of such a thing as an association of animals into a structure with stem and branches altogether like a plant, and fixed to the soil as a plant is fixed; and the naturalists of that day preferred not to imagine it.  Even Reaumur could not bring himself to accept the notion, and France being blessed with Academicians, whose great function (as the late Bishop Wilson [116] and an eminent modern writer [117] have so well shown) is to cause sweetness and light to prevail, and to prevent such unmannerly fellows as Peyssonel from blurting out unedifying truths, they suppressed him; and, as aforesaid, his great work remained in manuscript, and may at this day be consulted by the curious in that state, in the Bibliotheque du Museum d’Histoire Naturelle.  Peyssonel, who evidently was a person of savage and untameable disposition, so far from appreciating the kindness of the Academicians in giving him time to reflect upon the unreasonableness, not to say rudeness, of making public statements in opposition to the views of some of the most distinguished of their body, seems bitterly to have resented the treatment he met with.  For he sent all further communications to the Royal Society of London, which never had, and it is to be hoped never will have, anything of an academic constitution; and finally he took himself off to Guadaloupe, and became lost to science altogether.

Fifteen or sixteen years after the date of Peyssonel’s suppressed paper, the Abbe Trembley [118] published his wonderful researches upon the fresh-water Hydra.  Bernard de Jussieu [119] and Guettard [120] followed them up by like inquiries upon the marine sea-anemones and corallines; Reaumur, convinced against his will of the entire justice of Peyssonel’s views, adopted them, and made him a half-and-half apology in the preface to the next published volume of the “Memoires pour servir l’Histoire des Insectes;” and, from this time forth, Peyssonel’s doctrine that corals are the work of animal organisms has been part of the body of established scientific truth.

Peyssonel, in the extract from his memoir already cited, compares the flower-like animal of the coral to a “poulpe,” which is the French form of the name “polypus,”—­“the many-footed,”—­which the ancient naturalists gave to the soft-bodied cuttlefishes, which, like the coral animal, have eight arms, or tentacles, disposed around a central mouth.  Reaumur, admitting the analogy indicated by Peyssonel, gave the name of polypes, not only to the sea-anemone, the coral animal, and the fresh-water Hydra, but to what are now known as the Polyzoa, and he termed the skeleton which they fabricate a “polypier,” or “polypidom.”