Page:Sea and River-side Rambles in Victoria.djvu/77

58 species, all well worthy of careful study, but to enumerate the charms of one quarter of them would occupy more of our space than we can consistently afford them. Those who will collect them, will by getting a few leading ones named to serve as types, very soon master the most common species, and will find too much that will assist them in Landsborough's very pretty Book, to which we have before alluded, "The British Zoophytes," by Johnston, the very excellent Catalogue by Mr. Busk, of the Zoophytes in the British Museum, with most carefully drawn plates, which supplemented by the papers but lately read before the Royal Society of Victoria by our much valued friend, Dr. Macgillivray, of Williamstown, will give all our Australian species.

But say some of our companions, "we always fancied these were Seaweeds," nor is this a novel idea, since the very name given to the class—Zoophyta—(Zoon, an animal, and phyton, a plant, owes its origin to the doubts originally entertained by Naturalists as to the true place of the animals comprised in it, in the Natural Kingdom: why even Tournefort and Ray described and arranged them amongst the Seaweeds and Mosses!! In 1599, an Apothecary of Naples, Ferrante Imperato, published his "Historia Naturale" wherein he mentioned as the results of his observations,—the animals of Corals and Madrepores. Peysonnel (to whom a genus of Algæ has been dedicated), in the year 1727, had seen the Polypes of Coral and of Madrepores, had witnessed their motions,