the summer of 1754, when good Mr. Ellis, the wise and benevolent
West Indian merchant, read before the Royal Society his paper
proving the animal nature of corals, and followed it up the year
after by that "Essay toward a Natural History of the Corallines,
and other like Marine Productions of the British Coasts," which
forms the groundwork of all our knowledge on the subject to this
day. The chapter in Dr. G. Johnston's "British Zoophytes," p. 407,
or the excellent little RESUME thereof in Dr. Landsborough's book
on the same subject, is really a saddening one, as one sees how
loth were, not merely dreamers like, Marsigli or Bonnet, but sound-
headed men like Pallas and Linne, to give up the old sense-bound
fancy, that these corals were vegetables, and their polypes some
sort of living flowers. Yet, after all, there are excuses for
them. Without our improved microscopes, and while the sciences of
comparative anatomy and chemistry were yet infantile, it was
difficult to believe what was the truth; and for this simple
reason: that, as usual, the truth, when discovered, turned out far
more startling and prodigious than the dreams which men had hastily
substituted for it; more strange than Ovid's old story that the
coral was soft under the sea, and hardened by exposure to air; than
Marsigli's notion, that the coral-polypes were its flowers; than
Dr. Parsons' contemptuous denial, that these complicated forms
could be "the operations of little, poor, helpless, jelly-like
animals, and not the work of more sure vegetation;" than Baker the
microscopist's detailed theory of their being produced by the
crystallization of the mineral salts in the sea-water, just as he
had seen "the particles of mercury and copper in aquafortis assume
tree-like forms, or curious delineations of mosses and minute
shrubs on slates and stones, owing to the shooting of salts
intermixed with mineral particles:" - one smiles at it now: yet