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.
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