Page:Sea and River-side Rambles in Victoria.djvu/78

59 the extension of their tentacles, and the contraction and opening of the oral apertures, and moreover he discovered, what to most minds should have been conclusive, that their corruption exhaled the odour, and their chemical analysis discovered the constituent principles of animal matters; still, when submitted to the Academy of Science at Paris, it was coldly and doubtingly received by the Members. Jussieu, some twenty years subsequently, confirmed the observations of Peysonnel, and extended his own to Sertulariæ and Flustræ.

Reaumur also in an able manner reviewed the ground already gone over, and declared in favor of the animality of Zoophytes, and predicted that many then unexamined would have to be added to the list. There were still many disputants on the subject, so 10th are men to give up opinions already formed; but a merchant of London, Mr. John Ellis, who was particularly fond of Natural History, and had amused himself with making landscapes of Seaweeds and Corallines (?) on paper, was induced to look more minutely into the structure of the latter by aid of the miscroscopemicroscope [sic], and he discovered that these so called Corallines, on examination, indicated more of an Animal than Vegetable nature, an opinion which subsequent investigations fully bore out, and any statement made by Ellis was valuable, since he only detailed facts, ex visu, or an inference from them. And so from this time up, in spite of many contradictory hypotheses, the animality of the Zoophytes has been firmly established.