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."
The progress of discovery, since Reaumur's time, has made us very
completely acquainted with the structure and habits of all these
polypes.
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